[self-interest] Re: GC (was... something else)

[Douglas Atique]

So, there are objects that can't be garbage collected because primitives depend on them.
In fact, the objects you mentioned, true, false, nil, etc. are part of the language
definition, instead of simple objects. If they are destroyed, the language loses part of
its semantics. But for the user objects, those that don't play a special role in
implementing the language definition, the root is still the lobby. Am I right?
There is more below.

Douglas

mario at Eng.Sun.COM wrote:

> > Ain't this a bit strange? I mean, if I (a Self programmer) remove all references to
> > an object (and I guess for us Self programmers the lobby is THE root) by removing
> > it from the lobby, shouldn't the VM garbage collect the object?
>
> What I'm saying is that the lobby is not the only root, nor can it
> be.  All those other objects have to exist too.  For example, there
> has to be a true object because you can write 1 _Equals: 1 and the VM
> has to return _something_.

If one performs the destructive process I did, of removing all slots from the lobby,
theoretically, one should end with a useless world because nothing could be typed in the
prompt, besides self, that would match any slot in any accessible object. But with
primitives one can reconstruct everything (at least from the initial empty world) by
recovering objects from the objectIDArray.
If primitives were method slots of a special system object, then these objects on which
primitives depend could be referenced by slots on this system object. But this doesn't
eliminate the problem that one comes and _RemoveSlot: from this object until it
degenerates into an empty object, unless the slots are hardwired and cannot be removed.
Another solution would be Jecel's ideas about permissions.

> Similarly for all the other objects whose
> existence is implied by the language (nil, true, the assignment
> object, prototypical activations, etc.), their parents, and their
> mirrors.  The object ID array is there because otherwise you wouldn't
> be able to refer to the results of expressions entered at the VM
> prompt.

I have noticed that between sessions the IDs assigned to an object are not fixed and
unique, for example, when I open Self with the empty world and type self at the prompt,
the lobby is assigned ID <0>. However, if I type some expression that evaluates to an
error, the <0> ID is assigned to the process object and lobby gets ID <1>.

>
>
> Anything not reachable from the set of roots (as enumerated in my
> earlier email) _will_ be GCed.
>
> Mario
>
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