On Sat, Mar 9, 2013 at 6:48 AM, Igor Stasenko <siguctua@gmail.com> wrote:

Well, maybe it's an overkill .. it is mainly about speed and reusing
VM's lookup mechanism
for searching a name over multiple scopes (when you have namespaces
with imports).

On a first run, you will replace
"read value of <binding>" bytecode with " send #value to <binding>"
but that implies having a binding at compile time (you must lookup for
a name at compile time).
It also means that you won't change anything semantically: even though
you sending a message,
you still accessing the very same state which you bound early at compile time.

Right. The lookup happens at compile time. When the method is actually executed, we're just fetching the value from the binding we found at compile time. I don't see how that's going to be slow. In the most common case, a class reference, it's not even a message send, because we have a dedicated bytecode. For global variables, it'll be two message sends: we send #value to the alias binding, which then sends #value on to the canonical binding in the environment's "contents" dictionary.

Then, i wonder, if such change is actually worth doing. Because if you
don't do lookup dynamically,
then there is no change.

Sure there is. We still bind names at compile time, but we have changed the way names are resolved.

Colin