Well... it is needed for the swapping out of classes. If we remove #isInMemory, we should also remove the whole image segment stub mechanism because it becomes useless without the isInMemory protection.
what I was thinking to remove is the use of isInMemory from SystemDictionary>>allClasses and friends. Now I do not get 100% what you are saying. Do you say that all the queries should be protected against bringing back classes on disc? Stef
But was this ever working? Was this ever *used* the last 10 years? Are actually all cases covered? So are there enough #isInmemory checks to not end up with loading everything anyways?
We already removed the *gently variants for iterating over subclasses, for example. or the "ifPresentAndInMemory" things....
Yes, I did some experiments with it lately and managed to create 4MB images. Cases which are not protected are indeed a problem.
I would like to keep that working and extract it with the image segments code into an external package. How to do this cleanly is an interesting question, though...
I think we should ask the question: Do we intent to *use* this mechanism *at all* the next 5 years?
Probably not. Nevertheless, I think its a nice idea but if it is not properly working the chances are small anybody will use.
In any case, the question of how this *could* be factored out in a clean way is interesting if we want to further strip and modularize the image. It seems we are missing appropriate abstractions to modify from external packages behavior like the #isInMemory sends. Overrides are an unsatisfactory solution. So there is a limitation to the kind of code can be made external packages.
-- Marcus Denker -- http://www.marcusdenker.de INRIA Lille -- Nord Europe. Team RMoD.
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