Re: ABM/Toolkit futures [was: Swarm futures (was Re: GNUstep and MacOS X Port Effort)]

[Russell Standish]

I first looked at Swarm to do my modeling in 1996, and since then
looked at it a couple of other times. However, it never suited my
needs, so I've ended up creating my own system called Ecolab.

So what's wrong with Swarm? The objective C implementation language is
a little too simple, and make coding the sorts of things I do hard to
understand. I do need operator overloading. Generic programming, a la
C++ templates has also proved a boon. Unfortunately, Java offers
neither of these, nor does ObjC. Being able to code an experiment
as a script (runtime configuration) is also a great feature of
Ecolab. Presumably the newer Java interface is a way to do this, but
I'm quite happy to use TCL for this purpose.

Another consideration is that native, parallelising compilers are
available for C++, but not for the other languages.

The most benefit I've had from Swarm is as an inspiration for how to
do things in Ecolab - it never helped as an implmentation environment.

We're currently working on a project to allow C++ objects to be made
visible within the Objective C environment, and vice-versa. This may
well make it more feasible to embed C++ models into Swarm. However,
I'm very unlikely to be attracted to a Java implementation.

                                                Cheers

Jason Alexander wrote:
> 
> This is a long email.  My apologies.

...
> 
> 
> If you believe what I've said above, the biggest problems are:
> 
> (1) Make Swarm easy to install.
> (2) Make Swarm easy to use (without, presumably, sacrificing power 
> and/or features)
> (3) Make it possible to describe modeling problems in a high-level 
> language.
> (4) Make it easy to share models.
> (5) Make it easy to graft custom GUI interfaces on top of Swarm.
> (6) Make it easy to create (and share) extension libraries for Swarm.
> 
> Other desiderata:
> 
> (7) Get Swarm running (easily) on all major platforms.
> (8) Make it possible (perhaps) to embed Swarm models in a web page.
> 



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A/Prof Russell Standish                  Director
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