Adding a new imediate type

Yoshiki Ohshima yoshiki at squeakland.org
Wed Jan 11 04:57:04 UTC 2006


  Hello,

>   instantiateSmallClass:sizeInBytes:fill:.
> 
> All it needs to do, is grab some memory then populate it. That's a
> fairly short sequence, so long as a GC isn't necessary. The speed gain
> will be from specialising the entire primitive for the case where a GC
> isn't needed. It's more code, and more special cases, but still
> probably easier than creating new intermediates.

  This is *not* related to Point creation, but I once proposed to have
a object creation primitive for non-pointer objects that doesn't
zero-out the content, but just "grab" some memory.

  For methods like String>>copyReplaceFrom:to:with: and such, this can
give 30% or so improvement.  Also, the primitive 105 seems to handle
it properly (i.e., fails) when the content of a non-pointer object is
copied over to a pointer object.  So, it should be "safe enough".

  The novice users shouldn't use it casually, but for people who need
such performance gain, it would be convenient to have.

-- Yoshiki





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