Refactoring Associations
Andrew P. Black
black at cse.ogi.edu
Mon Jul 12 23:02:50 UTC 2004
I've been engaged (in my spare time) for about a year in refactoring
associations so that they and their subclasses work a bit more
rationally. And I almost have a change set that works!
The tricky bit was to get a change set that files in. This I now
have, but it took a lot of hand work, because there are various
checks to make sure that Association is NOT recompiled.
OK, so it files in. And most things seem to work. But the
WeakIdentityKeyDictionary "ObsoleteSubclasses" (a class variable of
Behavior) is messed up after the file in. It should, I think, hold a
mapping between "Association" (that is, the class) and an array of
its now obsolete subclasses #(WeakKeyAssocation). It actually holds
a mapping between a weak "#(Association)" and that array. Very
strange.
I think that it's my fault. WeakKeyAssociations used to be
implemented by putting a weak one-element array in the key slot of
an association. With my refactoring, they are now implemented by
using the weak slot of a new subclass, HalfWeakAssociation, for the
key and the strong slot for the value, which means that the relative
positions of the slots have been switched.
Now, here is my question. Does something in the VM or the GC know
about WeakKeyAssociations? That is, does something (think) that it
knows about this hidden one-element array. Is that how the one
element array is appearing in ObsoleteSubclasses?
I've done the obvious stuff: the only value that Behavior uses as a
key in ObsoleteSubclasses is "self". If it is not something in the
VM or GC magic, I can't see where this broken key is coming from.
I'm attaching my changeset, and my tests for Association. (This
requires the dictionary = fix that I just mailed out.) Inspect
ObsoleteSubclasses before and after you file AssociationRefact.Hand
in.
Andrew
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