What do you think?
I am for... for the JIT is is a monomorphic send to a primitive, so
the IC will be very effective
and should take care that the lookup is actually almost never done.
(and the lookup is the
only thing the #class bytecode saves, as the target method is a
primitive).
I think that programmers should have the illusion that the VM interacts
with the system through message sends. By being able to overwrite this
particular message you break this illusion. The VM will just fetch the
real class; but the user doesn't get access to it anymore. Telling the
system that this particular message shouldn't be overwritten is probably
a good thing.
If you want to overwrite the method class, maybe your tools should send
another message than class in the first place?
I do however agree that many other optimizations become slightly
superfluous, such as bytecodes for integer operations ... that somehow
seems like compile-time inline-cached behavior without the ability to
flush the cache :)
cheers,
Toon
