Right now ponie is still reference counting. In effect it's duplicating the work of parrot's DOD registration scheme. For space and efficiency reasons it would be very useful to move the ponie reference counts outside the actual PMCs, and effectively store them in a hash, much like the DOD reference counting system.
However, I think it's wrong to use the DOD reference counting system for a couple of reasons 1: The Perl refcounting API lets you get (and set) the actual refcount value. Whilst I'm quite happy to refuse to support general purpose setting it, I suspect that getting it is still needed. Certainly it's needed in the interim for code migration 2: Code should care about the reference count. (Although I believe that some does). I'd not like to (ask to) extend parrot's DOD registration API to get the reference count out, because that opens it up to (ab)use by parrot extensions. The DOD reference count is "none of your business" 3: I think I might need the ability to iterate over all the allocated Ponie PMCs So I think what I'd like is a PMC that provides the same functionality as dod_register_pmc in pmc.c [see http://svn.perl.org/parrot/trunk/src/pmc.c ] wrapped into a regular PMC. Basically it provides a hash keyed on addresses, value is a reference count, where the key/value pair is automatically deleted if the reference count drops to 0. Only it is (in effect) a singleton. I'd like to be able to provide this as a non-singleton PMC class, with the addition of a value lookup, and (possibly) iteration. But cut and paste is evil. So does anyone have suggestions on the best way to be able to refactor the code in pmc.c such that it can provide a (private) API for a core PMC to wrap, without slowing down the DOD's use of the same code. Does this seem sane? Can anyone see a good way of doing this? Nicholas Clark
