Utilities pointersTo: object
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From: Mariano Martinez Peck Sent: Thursday, July 15, 2010 8:40 AM To: Squeak Development Discussion Virtual Machine Subject: [Vm-dev] Detecting objects that point to an object
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Hi folks. I need to know the objects (actually, only how many) that are pointing to any object. So...I take an object X, and I want to know how many objects are pointing to X.
The only possible I see in Squeak VM is to do a full mark over all objects in memory (or starting by the roots). This is time consuming and I even need (maybe) to do this check (to know how many objects are pointing to an object) for every single object.
So...is there a faster solution for this? The only thing I can imagine is to modify the object header, maybe create a new type, and add an array with the addresses of the objects that are pointing to that object. Or maybe just a counter that I can increase or decrease ?
Thanks for any tip.
Mariano