After suffering from coder's block (if that's the programmer's equivalent of writer's block) for weeks, I finally got started the past week on the new object model remapping infrastructure. I spent most of the week going in circles. Writing code, deleting it, writing more code, deleting it again. However, I think I figured it out now. To test that theory I decided to write a blog entry about it. Explaining something is usually a good way to find holes in your own understanding.
I'm going to start out by describing the problem. Then I'll look at the existing solution and it's limitations. Finally I'll explain the new approach I came up with. If everything goes well, by end the of the entry you'll be wondering "why did it take him so long to come up with this, it's obvious!". That means I came up with the right solution and I explained it well.
Note that I'm ignoring ghost interfaces in this entry. The current model will stay the same. For details, see the previous entries on ghost interfaces.
What are the goals?
The .NET model (relevant types only):
For comparison, here is the Java model that we want to map to the .NET model:
There are several possible ways to go (I made up some random names):
What's wrong with equivalance?
Both J# and the current version of IKVM use equivalence (although many of the details differ and J# doesn't consider Throwable and System.Exception to be equivalent) and it works well. So why change it? There are four advantages to the mixed model:
class ThrowableToString { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { String s = "cli.System.NotImplementedException"; Object o = Class.forName(s).newInstance(); Throwable t = (Throwable)o; System.out.println(o.toString()); System.out.println(t.toString()); } }
Obvously, both lines should be the same. Another (at the moment theoretical) problem is that it is legal for code in the java.lang package to call Object.clone or Object.finalize (both methods are protected, but in Java, protected also implies package access), currently that wouldn't work.
Here is the mixed model I ended up with:
I called it mixed because it combines some features of equivalence and extension. For example, references of type java.lang.Object are still compiled as System.Object (like in the equivalence model), but the non-remapped Java classes extend java.lang.Object (like in the extension model).
java.lang.Object will contain all methods of the real java.lang.Object and in addition to those also a bunch of static helper methods that allow you to call java.lang.Object instance methods on System.Object references. The helper methods will test if the passed object is either a java.lang.Object or a java.lang.Throwable (for virtual methods) and if so, it will downcast and call the appropriate method on those classes, if not, it will perform an alternative action (that was specified in map.xml when this classpath.dll was compiled).
Object.finalize requires some special treatment since we don't want java.lang.Object.finalize to override System.Object.Finalize because that would cause all Java objects to end up on the finalizer queue and that's very inefficient. So the compiler will contain a rule to override System.Object.Finalize when a Java class overrides java.lang.Object.finalize.
I glossed over a lot of details, but those will have to wait for next time.
FOSDEM 2004
Finally a short note on FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developer's Meeting). Last weekend I visisted FOSDEM in Brussels. I enjoyed seeing Dalibor, Chris, Mark, Sascha and Patrik again and I also enjoyed meeting gjc hackers Tom Tromey and Andrew Haley for the first time. Mark wrote up a nice report about it. If you haven't read it yet, go read it now. All in all a very good and productive get-together.
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