phhh, let me try again :)
On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 8:47 AM, Frank Shearar <frank.shea...@gmail.com>wrote: > On 17 January 2013 17:45, Eliot Miranda <eliot.mira...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > > > > On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 3:25 AM, Igor Stasenko <siguc...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> > >> After some thought i decided to contribute my 2cents. > >> > >> First, i think it is impossible to introduce a (re)initialization > >> logic which would suit all different scenarios. > >> Because it is really depends on what is stored in class variables and/or > >> pools > >> and if you add subclasses and then instances into the soup, you might > >> end up with something > >> which is really hard to safely reinitialize, because it may have some > >> inconsistent state at different stages > >> of initialization. It also, sometimes an order of initialization is > >> important. > > > > > > Yes, but on *can* write idempotent class initialization code. So that if > > the system does reinitialize on every load old code may break until its > > fixed, but new code will have the advantage of always being correctly > > initialized. Note that in the VMMaker class reinitializations of the > core > > VM classes (the interpreter, garbage collector, jit, etc) are done *on > each > > launch of the simulator*, and *each vm generation*, let alone on each > > package load :). [ I'm not recommending this :) ]. > > > > One thing I do is when creating singletons for sentinels etc I check > whether > > they've been initialized. e.g. > > > > initialize > > Sentinel ifNil: [Sentinel := Object new] > > Knowing full well that I know next to nothing about concurrency in the > image, and so realising that this might be a complete non-issue: lazy > initialization and concurrency do not mix well. > Agreed, but the two can be decoupled. For example one can build the state and then assign it. Assignment is currently atomic so there are no multicore issues here (yet :) ). Further, assignments are not suspension points so a sequence of (just) assignments are guaranteed to occur without interruption. And (I'm sure you realize, for give the pedantry) the above example isn't lazy, it is eager. It simply refuses to create another Sentinel if one exists already. > But I do agree with your sentiment: idempotency is highly desirable, > and somehow forcing non-idempotent class initialisation to fail > quickly and noisily sounds like a good plan. > > frank > -- best, Eliot
