TaggedArrays (Proposal)

[Rémi Forax]

On 07/02/2012 04:11 PM, ravenex wrote:
> Very cool stuff, Jim and Rickard!
> I guess people are going to start missing NaN encoded tagged 
> value/pointers now that there's something real to play with ;-)
>
> @Remi The subclass suggestion sounds a lot like Maxine's Hybrid 
> objects, where named fields and an untyped array is bundled into a 
> single object. Which pretty much emulates what people like to do in 
> C/C++, something nice to have.
>
> > I think that getValue()/setValue() should return the long with the 
> bit set because
> > If i want to execute x + 1, I can convert it to x + 2 at compile 
> time thus avoid the shifts at runtime.
>
> Even without changing the API, this kind of transformation could 
> easily be intrinsified in the JITs, not a big worry. Cheers, Raven 

Yes, it's the Maxine hybrid object and also comes from the fact that 
most of the runtime have a common super type,
like RubyObject in JRuby, GroovyObject in Groovy etc. which is used to 
provide a base class for some
specialized runtime classes.

Rémi