Hi VM gurus!
I just responded to a persistence thread on the seaside-list and it occurred to me that I should ask you guys - especially Eliot I guess - will the new VM have support for detecting object modification?
...and oh, when do we get the new awesome VM? I am doing reload on mirandabanda every day but no luck so far... :) :)
Cees de Groot explained a technique (a long while back) using an immutability bit on objects - combined with some Exception being signalled when an immutable object is about to be modified. This way you get both support for immutable objects AND "dirty marking" because you can always catch the Exception, add the object as "dirty" in a pool, and then resume.
Especially for all the persistence solutions out there this would be great to have - and would eliminate trickery like WriteBarrier:
http://map.squeak.org/packagebyname/writebarrier
regards, Göran