Re: FYI: Linker & Verifier fixes (really GC mark procedures)

[Andrew Haley <aph@redhat.com>]

Tom Tromey writes:
 > >>>>> "Andrew" == Andrew Haley <aph@redhat.com> writes:
 > 
 > Andrew> Indeed.  I have a patch in the pipeline that causes all objects of
 > Andrew> class Class to be properly allocated rather than statically allocated
 > Andrew> by the linker.  In turn, this has the potential to make _Jv_MarkObj
 > Andrew> eventually go away.
 > 
 > I did a little work on the gcjx branch in this area.  But it has
 > never been tested.  Anyway the idea was that the compiler could emit
 > real mark descriptors for Class, by special-casing it a bit in
 > boehm.c.
 > 
 > With your work we could just defer this to runtime like we do for
 > interpreted classes.  The goal would be to remove all the
 > Class-specific code from _Jv_MarkObj.

Right.  I've been trying to get this done all year, but I keep getting
sidetracked to fix other things.  Sigh...

But yeah, my plan is to remove almost all knowledge of the shape of an
instance of Class from the compiler, and then the runtime can do
whatever is convenient.  I'm a bit worried that this might result in
long startup times, so I'm going to be cautious -- at least to begin
with.

Andrew.