[armedbear-devel] Some thoughts on classloaders, ...

[Alessio Stalla]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 9:32 AM, Don Cohen
<don-sourceforge-xxz at isis.cs3-inc.com> wrote:
> Alessio Stalla writes:
>  > In other
>  > words, the JVM is natively object oriented, it has no concept of
>  > function, only methods.
> This is not, in my mind, the same thing as being natively object
> oriented.  A function could be an object too.
> If you wish I'll be happy to view a function as a method of a class
> that is nothing more than a container for that function.

Exactly, we agree. The point I was trying to make is that the
container class must exist, so the compiler must create it.

>  > It doesn't only supports loading from files. Out of the box there are
>  > classloaders that know how to load code from arbitrary URLs, from JARs
>  > inside WARs (packaged web applications), and more; you can write your
>  > own and even generate code on the fly if you want, but, no matter
>  > what, the end result will always be a class with methods holding the
>  > code.
> Good, so you should be able to write a "classloader" that supports
> creation of an anonymous subclass of "compiledFunction" (of which
> there might never be any instances) given a single argument of type
> byte vector.

Anonymous classes don't exist in the JVM, but apart from that, you
have just described the abcl classloader ;) However, my original point
was not about the general compilation model of abcl, which is more
than fine by me; rather, it was about the specific fact that the
generated code includes instructions to load the other code it needs
(compiled local functions), and I think that is a Bad Idea and we can
use classloaders properly to avoid it.

Bye,
Ale