The real advantages of pure object-oriented systems or why object-oriented extensions to C are doomed to fail

Abstract

Object-oriented languages provide facilities for code reuse, abstraction, encapsulation, instantiation, polymorphism, and inheritance. Major differences between pure object-oriented languages like Smalltalk and hybrid languages like C++, Objective-C, and Object Pascal are discussed. It is argued that the inclusion of both pointer and nonpointer types and the lack of garbage collection in hybrid systems is a major impediment to reliability, correctness, and extensibility. Hybrid systems lack design environments that permit evolutionary code development, which is a major impediment to rapid, and therefore cost-effective, software development and to the development of reusable libraries.<>