Removed GNU dtable and sparse array implementations, replaced entirely now with versions based on the Étoilé runtime. Performance is roughly equivalent in microbenchmarks, memory usage is significantly lower (Gorm goes from 95MB to 50MB on my machine - this will be even more pronounced on 64-bit systems), which should improve cache usage considerably. Still room for some performance tuning, however.
I now have an out-of-tree replacement for the dtable stuff, so sarray.{h,c} will be going away soon. The replacement offers similar (slightly worse currently) performance in microbenchmarks, but uses half as much memory (Gorm goes from 95MB to 48MB on my machine). This will be committed once it's been tweaked a little bit.
Imported selector table code frm the Étoilé runtime. We can now make dispatch type dependent with a -D switch. Not enabled yet, but it will be enabled in a warning mode soon - I consider preferable to the existing GNU and Apple solution of corrupting the stack.
Quentin: This was the category loading problem that you saw. It was dependent upon load order, so was difficult to reproduce, however a Smalltalk category on NSString overriding a method from NSObject demonstrated it (because GSString was always initialized by the time Smalltalk code is loaded because LKCompiler use it, but not by the time ObjC code is loaded).
- Now only one thread may be in any +initialize method at once.
- Not yet implemented for the new ABI lookup function.
The first I don't see as a limitation; if anything having +initialize methods
be guaranteed not to run concurrently may be convenient. The second I will fix
soon.
