[Vm-dev] questions about a couple of primitives

[Florin Mateoc]

Hi,

I had some unexpected results while looking at some primitives in the
system, and I wanted to ask if they are expected/intentional:

1. 'ab' instVarAt: 1    =>    97    (and 'ab' instVarAt: 2    =>    98)
    I would have thought that #instVarAt: has pointer granularity, so I am
curious if the observed behavior is an accident or intentional (and maybe
even used somewhere)

2. | o | o := Object new. (WeakArray with: o) pointsTo: o    =>    true
    I thought the main use case for #pointsTo: was to find hard references
(e.g. for chasing memory leaks). The current behavior actually makes that
use case a little more difficult to implement, since you have to special
case weak references. When would one be interested in finding weak
references?

3. The comment and the primitive used in #ensure: and #ifCurtailed: are the
same, but the primitive failure code is different - the one for
#ifCurtailed seems buggy, it never evaluates the argument

None of the above are critical, but I am curious about them.
Thank you in advance for any clarifications,

Florin
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