Monday 16 May 2011

Dynamic classes

The dynamic classes are implemented as per above:

  • class table: the class descriptor is just an attribute indexed (type, RA, RAΔ, etc.) array with indexes pointing out to the relative offset of the attribute in question.
  • all the attributes within the class table, their names and numbers, must either be hard-coded or loaded to be known at the time when the class arrays are allocated, since each class array must be indexed by all known attributes,
  • object layout: objects are allocated to contain exactly what the class array allows, and just nothing more ¹).
¹) with the natural exception for pointers to memchunks representing objects in a quite different way

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