At 04:21 PM 2/12/2001 -0300, Branden wrote:
>Jan Dubois wrote:
>You point out two disadvantages:
>
> > - It steal 2 bits from the SvTYPE flags. Flags are a *very* scarce
> > resource and shouldn't be used up unless there are very good reasons
> > for it.
> >
> > - Using shared strings is not totally backward compatible: Extensions
> > *must* check if a SV* is shared and naturalize it if it intends to
> > change the contents. Note that I had to patch one occurrence of this
> > in the bundled Data::Dumper. This could be improved *some* by adding
> > XSUBPP for it, but wouldn't help in case the extension accesses SvPVX
> > directly.
>
>Considering Perl 6 will be built from scratch, I think these are not an
>issue anymore, right?
Wrong. Flags will always be in scarce supply (nature of the beast). Shared
strings, at least inside perl, are reasonably problematic, as it means
doing software copy-on-write stuff, along with having to make the garbage
collector smart enough to deal with multiple PMCs pointing to identical memory.
Neither are an insurmountable problem, but I don't think it's one worth
tackling for the first cut.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
