This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: On sandboxing Smalltalk Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Over on Ralph's blog, the topic of sandboxing has come up. It's a great discussion, but there's one thing I don't always agree with:

The main bad thing that could happen is that imported code could change existing code. Smalltalk makes it easy to change code. "Obect compiledMethods removeKey: #copy" will remove the copy method from class Object. It would be very bad if imported code could do this to a running application.

While blowing away methods in base classes would be bad, blowing away methods in general may not be - in BottomFeeder, an update to the application can make major changes to base application code - and sometimes to overridden methods in various libraries. It's a complex issue.