TaggedArrays

[Mark Roos]

Hi Jim

When you say you are using TaggedArrays for instances are you boxing the 
array in another object
(NashObject -)  which holds other object properties?  In other words 
instead of instances being slots
in an object they are locations in an Array which is in a slot in the 
object.

As for using a frame based construct for the stack do you see issues with 
generating a new frame
object for each send?  In older Smalltalks they had to go to a frame cache 
to keep this under control
and then we are back to nulling the slots to support GC which as Charles 
points out takes time.

And finally TaggedArrays seem very much like a substitute for John Rose's 
Fixnums 
https://blogs.oracle.com/jrose/entry/fixnums_in_the_vm.   Do you see any 
need for Fixnums given
the work you are doing?  Other than the extra overhead of an object header 
it seems like a single
element TaggedArray is the equivalent of a Fixnum

regards
mar
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