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

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Thu Aug 26 21:58:21 UTC 2010


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. 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


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