Cees de Groot <cg at cdegroot.com> wrote:

> Apart from security, you'd also want some minimal-on-demand code loading
> scheme. That is to say, you wouldn't want to suck in whole packages, but
> probably fault on the class/method level in order to keep per-image
> memory usage down to a minimum.
Not quite as simple as it might seem; since you cannot guarantee that a
method will be found in any particular class you would need some tag
mechanism to say that you'd already done all required fetching.

For example, you cannot simply wait for a dNU because there might already be
an implementation in Object but your class really has one in its
superclass. So, I think that we would need a map somewhere to show that
each and every class had checked to see if any local version of any
method existed. If it has been checked but the method does not exist, go
to superclass and so on.

I suppose you could just extend the method dictionary to allow for
method-seletor/'true' as well as nil and method-selector/method pairs.
The problem with that is that method dictionaries would get pretty big
pretty fast.

tim
-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Performance proven: It works through beta test.