Comparison

In summary, although there is overlap between the communities, the working group discussed several areas where the reuse community has particular innovations to offer:

1. The reuse community has pioneered generative approaches, which might work better for some problems (global optimization, security, ...). The OO community might consider meta-object protocols as addressing some of these concerns.
2. The reuse community is concerned with behavioral compatibility of components, not just (primarily) structural compatibility. In the OO world, things like contracts, Eiffel's executable assertions, and Larch/C++ are heading in this direction.
3. The reuse community is concerned with formal methods in many respects. In particular, formal methods as applied to classification, searching, matching, and retrieval of components, and formal methods as applied to specification, typically are not part of the OO focus.
4. The reuse community is concerned with fundamental problems and with a long range view of software (the whole life-cycle view), especially when compared to, e.g., Visual Basic.