submemories and grouping objects (was: Re: Islands up and running)
Michael van der Gulik
mikevdg at hetnet.nl
Mon Jul 7 21:26:45 UTC 2003
Mmm.. yummy. I'll be sinking my teeth into that tommorrow!
Lex (or others) - I have a question. You mention 'submemories' at the
end of that document about Islands, referenced below. Has anybody ever
tried anything like this?
I'm currently working on my master's project about replicating objects
(dpon.sourceforge.net). My current problem is how to increase the
'granularity' - replicating a single object is just too inefficient
because objects are small; on the order of a few dozen bytes. A way to
do this is to use 'submemories', 'segments', 'object groups' or whatever
you would like to call them, to group related objects together and
replicate them as a block. Kind of like what ImageSegments do.
The way I see it, there are two ways of attacking this - the hard way
and the soft way. The soft way is by putting your hand into the goop of
objects and pulling a handful of inter-related objects out. That would
then be your segment. You can then do goopy things with object goop,
like splitting it in two, or merging it with another goop, or throw it
back in the pool of goop. You would catch messages going to that goop
and use them to replicate the objects in that segment.
The hard way would be to make hard segments - define objects to
explicitely be owned by another. Then you have a sort of ownership
hierarchy, with owner objects acting as Interfaces (or
SegmentManager's?) to a segment. This is nice because you can do
security stuff and management stuff. Security stuff would be like not
allowing objects 'private' to a segment to be referenced from outside
(an extra layer of protection above capabilities), and perhaps vice
versa. Management stuff would be like you say - this segment is only
allowed to use so much memory, and so much CPU time and below a
particular priority etc. There are also a lot more possibilities.
Essentually it would let you make lots of mini-VM's that are completely
isolated (except for an interface to the outside world) from the rest of
Squeak.
Sorry; this has got a bit long. My question was: "Has anybody ever done
anything related to grouping objects together?".
Michael.
Lex Spoon wrote:
> If anyone wants to play with Islands, it's much easier now.
>
> Download everything from:
>
> http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2074
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