Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Yeah, you might be right about that. I didn't look too closely. (I did 
> however spend an evening reading through all the GC documentation to see 
> how it has different areas for young objects, old objects, large 
> objects, persistent objects, object objects... It all seemed quite 
> sophisticated.)

That was C#. I don't think Smalltalk-80 had any of that stuff. GC gets 
really complicated when you start throwing in destructors, and even more so 
when you start letting the user arbitrarily pin down bits of heap-allocated 
memory and passing it to languages that use non-collectable pointers.

> move objects to another address space, hell maybe even a different 
> physical machine. I've always thought that would be quite cool. 

Yes. There were versions of Smalltalk that used library code to implement 
demand-paging of objects, just catching the DoesNotUnderstand message to 
page back in the object and re-issue the request.  Paging out was creating a 
small proxy and then become: on the proxy.

Lots of cool stuff you could do that way. Change the class declaration while 
the program is running and suddenly all the instances have the new layout, etc.


-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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