Unrelated to the change itself, here's another example of the
deleterious effects of trying to improve performance at the expense of
proper encapsulation and late-binding dynamism.

I'm referring to the use of an IdentityDictionary for the Smalltalk
Environment instead of a regular Dictionary.

Not ONLY does force ALL clients to make assumptions about internal
implementation,
  - not ONLY duplicating this poor #asSymbol coding style again and again,
  - it actually screws them over on performance in the real world
   -- where the class names are likely to have come from an external source,
   therefore as a String, forcing an extra lookup in the Symbol table
that is worse than the original single Dictionary lookup.

See?
_______
| iddict dict |
iddict := Smalltalk globals instVarNamed: 'declarations'.
dict := iddict as: Dictionary.
{
[ iddict at: 'Integer' asSymbol ] bench.
[ dict at: 'Integer' ] bench
}

 #('1,490,000 per second. 669 nanoseconds per run.' '3,620,000 per
second. 276 nanoseconds per run.')
_______

Optimization is like whack-a-mole.  Optimizing one thing invariably
incurs a cost on something else.  So would it not be best to choose
the trade-offs that actually *gain in the real-world* than ones that
gain only in the lab?  Chasing that last 1% gain achieved in the lab,
narrowed the usability, resulting in across-the-board losses for the
real world:  in code-quality, dynamism AND performance by a whopping
50%.

Regards,
  Chris


On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 4:00 PM <commits at source.squeak.org> wrote:
>
> Eliot Miranda uploaded a new version of ShoutCore to project The Trunk:
> http://source.squeak.org/trunk/ShoutCore-eem.62.mcz
>
> ==================== Summary ====================
>
> Name: ShoutCore-eem.62
> Author: eem
> Time: 29 November 2018, 2:00:34.775887 pm
> UUID: 45629ac9-52a5-412c-9bf1-493a0ac2ea36
> Ancestors: ShoutCore-tpr.61
>
> Fix a bug in SHMCClassDefinition>>sharedPools that answered nil as the pool for a missing pool, and hence broke khighlighting in the Monticello package browser when browsing older version s with different pool dictionary definitions.
>
> =============== Diff against ShoutCore-tpr.61 ===============
>
> Item was changed:
>   ----- Method: SHMCClassDefinition>>sharedPools (in category 'act like a class') -----
>   sharedPools
>         | d |
>         d := Set new.
> +       classDefinition poolDictionaries do:
> +               [:poolName|
> +               (Smalltalk at: poolName asSymbol ifAbsent:[nil]) ifNotNil: [:pool| d add: pool]].
> -       classDefinition poolDictionaries do:[:each |
> -               d add: (Smalltalk at: each asSymbol ifAbsent:[nil]) ].
>         ^d!
>
>