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The C Object System (COS)

The C Object System: Using C as a High-Level Object-Oriented Language, Laurent Deniau, arxiv 2010.

The C Object System (COS) is a small C library which implements high-level concepts available in Clos, Objc and other object-oriented programming languages: uniform object model (class, meta-class and property-metaclass), generic functions, multi-methods, delegation, properties, exceptions, contracts and closures. [...]

COS is interestingly built around fast multiple dispatch and delegation. It is implemented by a portable C library (C99 CPP required) and build tool. So, it's roughly a CLOSy GObject. Or a multiple dispatch, pruned Objective-C 1.0. No garbage collector. The exceptions are setjmp. The motivation is large-scale scientific code development and maintenance. LGPL. COS is the successor to Object Oriented C (OOC-2.0) and Object Oriented Programming in C (OOPC). The project currently appears alive, about 3 years old, out of CERN, with ~one developer, perhaps limited use, and no community infrastructure beyond SourceForge CVS.

On top of these concepts, it should be easy to implement high order messages, class-predicate dispatch, multiple inheritance, dynamic inheritance, dynamic classes, adaptive object model, reflection and advanced memory management.

COS homepage. Slides.

By Mitchell N Charity at 2010-07-29 21:56 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 8904 reads

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Discussed on reddit a few months ago

Here's the thread. I looked at the source at the time too, and it was a dizzying maze of macro magic. I did learn some new tricks though, which subsequently lead to a to-be-blogged technique based on a name mangling for writing user friendly polymorphic functions in C (with overloading ala type classes!). Of course, that's only a static dispatch technique, where COS performs dynamic dispatch.

By naasking at Fri, 2010-07-30 00:24 | login or register to post comments

Repackage for other languages?

Might parts of COS be repackaged for C++ and Objective-C, to get fast multi-methods there too? Over unmodified native classes?

Could C extensions for python/ruby/perl/etc be derived, replacing their current unusably-slow toy multi-method modules?

By Mitchell N Charity at Fri, 2010-07-30 23:14 | login or register to post comments