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Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 15:35:15 -0400
From: Dan Grossman <danieljg@cs.cornell.edu>
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Subject: Re: Alternative generic hash function
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[Veuillez me pardonner; je ne donne pas une traduction en français parce
que j'ai peur de petites fautes qui peut changer sévèrement la
signification.]

Francois Pottier wrote:
 
> Currently, mutable and immutable structures cannot be distinguished at
> runtime. This would require maintaining additional type information,
> and would probably introduce a lot of overhead.

Why do you think the overhead would be high?

I agree that:
* Changing the compiler and runtime system is a fair amount of work.
* A slightly different hash function does not justify the cost.
* The cost for recording mutability __per-field__ is probably large.

But I do not see why the __per-object__ overhead would be large.  From
my reading of the OCaml sources, it seems that:
* It is trivial for the compiler to maintain this information all the
way down to an allocation site.  At that point, it suffices to use a
different bytecode or native-code sequence to record that the object 
has at least one mutable field.
* Recording this information would only require 1 header bit.  (I
personally could live with 21 size bits.)  Getting this bit into the
header word should not be hard.
* Checking mutability dynamically would also be cheap.

I ask because there are plenty of clever tricks you can put in the
runtime system that exploit the immutability of objects.  Is there a
deeper problem I am missing?

Thanks.
--Dan

-- 
| Dan Grossman     www.cs.cornell.edu/home/danieljg H:607 256 0724 |
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