Peeping At The KeyHole

Craig Latta craig at netjam.org
Tue May 2 20:00:39 UTC 2006


Hi Chris--

 > ...how did you ever solve your issue about methods implemented in
 > superclasses..
 >
 > i.e., in the master image I have MyDomainClass>>#name, but
 > Object>>#name has already been faulted down, so I'm not getting the
 > correct implementation because DNU was not invoked...

	Ah, I love this trick. :)  In my changes to the garbage collector, I 
made it so that inert methods get replaced with nil, but the 
corresponding associations persist in their method dictionaries. And I 
changed method lookup in the virtual machine so that, when it finds one 
of those nils, it behaves as if there's no matching method at all 
anywhere in the class hierarchy.

	So great, you already brought in Object>>name. But there's still an 
entry for >>name in the method dictionary for MyDomainClass, and it 
refers to nil instead of a compiled method. So when you send name to an 
instance of MyDomainClass, a message-not-understood results, and 
MyDomainClass>>name gets swapped in.

	At some point, I'll remove all remaining "placeholders" from the kernel 
image (remember that a lot of them get nuked anyway when their entire 
class gets collected, due to a lack of references). But probably not 
until I've personally gone over every single "real" method remaining, 
written a comment for it, commented its class, its module, etc. :)

	With my previous two kernel images, I was able to point to any 
individual byte and justify why it was there (with the aid of the 
visualization tools[1]). I'm confident I'll be able to do the same with 
the latest kernel image, even though it does a little more than the 
other ones.


	thanks,

-C

-- 
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
www.netjam.org
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]





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