Building a minimal reflective kernel

What is the class Object? What is the class Class? Why the class Object is an instance of the class Class? If you ever ask yourself such questions, this book is for you.

After explaining the impact of representing classes as objects, you will develop step by step a minimal reflective kernel.

In this book you will learn:

- object instantiation, allocation, and initialization, - classes as objects,

- description of classes,

- creation of classes,

- method lookup and error handling,

- examples of metaclasses,

- bootstrap of a reflective system.

The content of this book has been used to teach reflective architectures for more than 15 years.

Stéphane Ducasse:

I'm expert in language design and reengineering. I worked on traits. Traits have been introduced in Pharo, Perl, PHP and under a variant into Scala, Groovy and Fortress. I'm expert on software quality, program understanding, program visualisations, reengineering and metamodeling. I'm one of the father of Moose, an open-source software analysis platform http://www.moosetechnology.org/ and https://modularmoose.org. I created Synectique a company building dedicated tools for advanced software analyses. I'm one of creator and the leader of Pharo http://www.pharo.org/ a dynamic reflective object-oriented language supporting live programming. Since 2013, I built the industrial Pharo consortium http://consortium.pharo.org and I lead the consortium engineering team.

Our objective is to deliver a highly robust, versatile, compact and productive environment to develop and deploy advanced applications.

I work regularly with companies (Thales, Wordline, Siemens, Berger-Levrault, Arolla,...) on software evolution problems. I wrote couple hundred articles and several books. I'm editor of two book collections available at: http://books.pharo.org.