SIFTING OUT THE GOLD - DELIVERING COMPACT APPLICATIONS FROM AN EXPLORATORY OBJECT-ORIENTED PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENT

Integrated, dynamically-typed object-oriented programming environments offer many advantages, but have trouble producing small, self-contain ed applications. Recent advances in type inference have made it possib le to build an application extractor for Self. The extractor was able to extract a medium-sized application in a few minutes. The extracted application runs in a tenth the space of the original environment. Exc ept for extracting reflection and sends with computed selectors, the e xtractor runs without human intervention and fully preserves the behav ior of the application.