Stack reification and JIT interaction question

stephane ducasse stephane.ducasse at free.fr
Sun Jan 21 21:03:58 UTC 2007


Thanks Allen

> BTW, its interesting that Digitalk's VMs did not have an explicit  
> thisContext operation and never bothered to have explicit context  
> objects. When necessary, the execution stack was reified into  
> unstructured array objects.  If Smalltalk code needed to analyze  
> these reified stacks they had to do all the work to parse them into  
> distinct activation records. Of course, using some context-like  
> facade objects was a big help to such stack processing.  In  
> hindsight, the absence of thisContext never seemed to be a major  
> impediment for VisualSmalltalk and its absence gave the VM designer  
> a bit more flexibility in the design of the actual execution  
> environment.

do you think that seaside could have been built on top Digitalk?
I have the impression that it would have been more difficult. Do I  
interpret correctly that in Digitalk you could not
change the stack from within Smalltalk?

Stef



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