Re: Implementation of true closures

Rohit Lodha wrote:


> Ruby has true closures and I am trying to implement a Virtual Machine
> for it. I have 2 options for effective implementation.
>
> 1) Using frame on the heap instead of the stack.
>
> 2) Using setjmp/longjmp and saving state across procedure calls.
>
> If anybody has a previous experience on any of the above techiques or
> perhaps many others, please share your experiences.


This workshop paper
http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/VisualWorks/DOWNLOAD/papers/oopsla99-contexts.pdf
describes my implementation for Smalltalk, which is an optimization of
the Deutsch Schiffman mechanism for Smalltalk-80. This uses a
compilation model typical of lisp implementations where closed-over
temporary variables accessed from multiple scopes are held in a
garbage-collected array on the heap, one per dynamic scope). But
notional heap contexts are in fact mapped to stack frames, so that one
has a virtual heap-resident object-per-frame call stack and heap objects
are only created when stack frames are accessed as such e.g. by a debugger.
--
_______________,,,^..^,,,____________________________
Eliot Miranda Smalltalk - Scene not herd

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