[Vm-dev] Questions related to immutability in Cog

[Ryan Macnak]

Hi Clement,

Per object immutability was implemented in the old, pre-Cog Newspeak VM
(NewspeakInterpreter). It has not yet been implemented current Cog Newspeak
VM (Stack/CoInterpreter + NewspeakVM=true), but the necessary bit is
reserved in the object header. It was used as part of an orthogonal
synchronization scheme to detect changed objects: mark synchronized objects
as immutable, trap on change attempt, add to dirty list and mark as mutable
again. A marked object is only shallowly immutable, and its instance
variables may contain mutable objects.

Ryan

On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 6:17 AM, Clément Bera <bera.clement at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> Hello everyone,
>
> I tried to understand how immutability is implemented in the CogVM
> (NewSpeak flavor). I have some questions:
>
> - Does it actually work and is it used ?
> - Does an object being immutable means that you can't edit its variable
> fields only or that you can't either edit its instance variables ? Because
> I don't see any code checking for instance variable stores in the Newspeak
> interpreter.
> - How does the immutability check works in machine code ? In the Newspeak
> interpreter there is an immutability check in #at:put: . In the at:put:
> generated by the JIT (for example CogObjectRepresentationFor32BitSpur) I
> don't see any immutability check. Did I miss some clever bit trick ? Does
> the Newspeak spur VMs use the #at:put: machine code version of the
> primitive ?
>
> Thanks !
>
>
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