Hi folks,

I've just uploaded to the Inbox a series of packages that implement a new
way of handling export and import of bindings between packages. The
protocol for working with environments remains the same, but internally,
it's quite different.

The idea here is to make imports eager, rather than lazy. Instead of the
"references" dictionary, which was a cache of the bindings that had been
imported during method compilation, an environment now has a "bindings"
dictionary, containing all bindings that are available during compilation.
This is much easier to understand, and more similar to the old
SystemDictionary approach, which should result in better compatibility.
Environments now inform each other when bindings are added and removed, so
that the bindings dictionary will always be up to date.

Also, following Nicolas Cellier's idea, the system of imports and exports
used to configure an environment is simpler and more "declarative" (to the
extent that Smalltalk could ever be considered declarative!). This should
make tool support easier to implement.

To try it out, load the packages into a trunk image in this order:

Environments-cwp.41
Environments-cwp.42
ShoutCore-cwp.40
Environments-cwp.43
Tests-cwp.281

In my image, this passes all the Environments tests, and appears to clean
up the bindings in the image nicely. This DoIt:

classes := Bag new.
CompiledMethod allInstancesDo:
[:method |
method allLiterals do:
[:literal |
classes add: literal class]].
classes sortedCounts.

answers this:

234856->ByteSymbol
58608->ClassBinding
17788->ByteString
12419->SmallInteger
10495->Association
3422->Array
2350->Float
2328->Global
1853->Character
863->AdditionalMethodState
207->LargePositiveInteger
61->LargeNegativeInteger
50->ByteArray
26->ScaledDecimal
4->WideString
2->Fraction

We have lots of ClassBindings, and some Globals, but no Aliases. AFAICT,
the associations in there are class variables. We should probably convert
those to Globals at some point.

Colin
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