On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 11:54 AM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> wrote:

> To not address your core questions, use of 188 is I think clunky.  Instead,
> implementing the mirror primitives in the mirrors seems simple and
> efficient.

You find it clunky because you can't just call the primitive, you have
to do a manual lookup to find the appropriate CompiledMethod first?
Fair enough. I don't think it's an issue with mirrors, because the
mirror encapsulates that clunky lookup behaviour, and lets us make us
of it through a clean and simple protocol. I prefer a smaller, more
general VM/image interface, with as much of the logic as possible in
the image.

But 188 does have the following practical advantages:

- it's present in older VMs that are already out there
- in the future we'll be able to make changes at the image level,
rather than having to ship new VMs

The other thread on your debugger improvements would be moot if they
had been based on 188 instead of custom primitives.

> Putting the mirror primitives in ContextPart is insecure, since
> anyone can to thisContext object: foo instVarAt: n.  But fixing this means a
> major design overhaul of the system re debugging and mirrors, so it can
> stand for now.  (After all anyone can do instVarAt: now, so we're a ways
> away from a secure Newspeak-style sandbox).

Agreed.

Colin