[Vm-dev] with permission I would like to claim slots 35 & 37 in the special objects array...

[stephane ducasse]

On Aug 26, 2010, at 11:58 PM, David T. Lewis wrote:

> 
> No objections from my point of view, although I do slightly prefer
> Andreas' approach.
> 
> These two slots were present in Squeak 3.6 but were apparently unused.
> I presume that they were intended for the (now dormant) NewCompiler
> work.

Thanks david for the cautious words. The new compiler is far from dormant in fact.
 Jorge worked a year on it. Since last week new compiler is called 
Opal (because this is the see around here where we can see england). 
Marcus, jb, jorge are working a lot on it. Marcus should send some announces about they progress. 
There is also a mailing-list and the result is quite pleasant. The goal is to use it in Pharo1.3.
So far large clean up to IR, decompiler working for fullclosures.....

> In the interest of general tidiness it would be best to recycle
> the slots, but for the sake of courtesy to anyone who still has an
> interest in NewCompiler it may be better to retain them a while longer
> (I think that there may be some interest it in for research purposes,
> even if it does not provide practical benefits otherwise).
> 
> I note also that the size of the special objects array can serve
> as a de facto version identifier, so it does not really hurt to
> have the array grow a little bit when some significant new feature
> is added.
> 
> Dave
> 
> On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 01:51:16PM -0700, Andreas Raab wrote:
>> 
>> Do we really need to recycle these slots? Why not just appending these 
>> to the end?
>> 
>> Cheers,
>>  - Andreas
>> 
>> On 8/26/2010 1:31 PM, Eliot Miranda wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Hi All,
>>> 
>>>    these two slots are the unused MethodContext and BlockContext
>>> prototypes.  They're either side of class BlockClosure.  I'd like to use
>>> one of them for threaded callbacks (the foreign callback process slot,
>>> upon which a callback from a foreign thread can be run) and keep another
>>> in reserve.  In Smalltalk these are indices 36 & 38 in
>>> SmalltalkImage>>recreateSpecialObjectsArray.  Objections,
>>> encouragements, alternatives?
>>> 
>>> best
>>> Eliot