On Jun 28, 2010, at 1:46 AM, Eliot Miranda wrote:
> Note: The Cog VM crashes on TestObjectsAsMethods.
>
> Yes. I never tried to get this to work. How important is this to people?
For Research: very. Lots of the experiments we did at SCG used this at least at
some
stage of implementing the prototype:
-> For the AOSTa experiments I looked at it originally
(see http://www.slideshare.net/MarcusDenker/diplom-vortrag-slides)
-> Persephone and therefore Reflectivity:
http://scg.unibe.ch/research/reflectivity
-> ChangeBoxes used it:
http://scg.unibe.ch/scgbib?query=Denk07c&display=abstract
-> I think ClassBoxes, too
-> The most commonly used implementation of MethodWrappers these days
uses it
(and is *much* simpler than the method-compilation-stub-generating
one)
It's a quite nice way to hook into "method execution" without having to resort
to compile a stub method.
If you need an "in-image" JIT of some sort, it provides a real nice way of
doing this purely from the
image side (no VM change needed):
http://scg.unibe.ch/scgbib?query=Denk07b&display=abstract
I think Andreas originally suggested ObjectsAsMethods years ago and I then made
sure that it was
integrated in the VM, as the AOStA experiments showed how powerful this can be
for experiments.
AOStA had to use a patched VM, then later persephone could run on a standard
VM, which simplified things a lot...
Yes, stub-methods can do anything (and with care can be faster), and having a
good code-generation framework
simplified actually doing this a lot.... e.g. one can use bytesurgeon and do it
on the level of bytecode.
(the paper uses MethodWrappers as an example:
http://scg.unibe.ch/cgi-bin/scgbib.cgi/abstract=yes?Denk06a)
Or just the RB AST (with the code generator), maybe helped by Helvetia's
quoting...
(more on Helevetia's quoting implementation:
http://scg.unibe.ch/research/helvetia/languageboxes)
Nut nevertheless: a MOP for method execution is very valuable not just from an
implementation standpoint, even more
from a concepual / thinking point of view. Good MOPs provide a better way of
*thinking*, they enable exploration.
I always rated this as one of those changes that, while being simple, opened up
a lot of space for experiments.
And it showed to me the value of a platform where a change like this is
integrated and not ignored.
Marcus
--
Marcus Denker -- http://www.marcusdenker.de
INRIA Lille -- Nord Europe. Team RMoD.
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