Re: FYI: Linker & Verifier fixes (really GC mark procedures)

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Bryce McKinlay writes:
 > Andrew Haley wrote:
 > >
 > > But yeah, my plan is to remove almost all knowledge of the shape of an
 > > instance of Class from the compiler, and then the runtime can do
 > > whatever is convenient.  I'm a bit worried that this might result in
 > > long startup times, so I'm going to be cautious -- at least to begin
 > > with.
 > 
 > I suspect it is actually possible to _improve_ startup time once this is 
 > fully implemented.
 > 
 > If the bulk of the class metadata is pointer-free and read-only, then we 
 > eliminate a vast number of relocations - so much less time ought to be 
 > spent in the dynamic linker. It should be possible to only create Class 
 > objects for classes which are actually used/referenced at runtime, so 
 > the added allocation overhead ought to be pretty minimal.

That might well be true, but we've (well, at least I have) been caught
this way before: assuming that something would be a speedup when it
turned out to be a slowdown.  I hope you're right.

Andrew.