In CLOS, instance remorphing considered useless in practice?

[Jean-Claude Beaudoin]

On Tue, Dec 8, 2020 at 4:17 PM Svante Carl v. Erichsen <
svante.v.erichsen at web.de> wrote:

> Hi!
>
> It is used all the time while working on a live system (image).
>
> If you want raw performance, you can often substitute structs, if you
> can live with the downsides: all objects from a class must be thrown
> away on redefinition (which might be OK if you want to treat e. g. a
> production system as unchangeable except through re-deployment), you
> only get single inheritance (which is often not needed anyway), and most
> of the MOP goodness is gone, starting with that you can't have a
> different metaclass than structure-class.  Also, because of the
> mentioned inflexibility, you have to dismiss several warnings if you do
> re-define a struct.
>
> On the other hand, structs have a lot of other, more low-level
> convenience tooling, e. g. automatic and portable serialization and
> deserialization.
>
> I _think_ that one might be able to create a new macro (let's say
> def-struct-class) that has exactly the same semantics as defstruct, but
> in development mode uses defclass underneath, while being an alias for
> defstruct in production mode.  It might get a bit hairy to adhere to
> :type :list or :vector, though.  The result is a bit limited, but just
> might be what you need.
>

Yep. Got that.


> The folk at ITA also did quite some work on compile-time metaprogramming
> in order to get fast objects etc., so maybe they can chime in.
>

This tells me that ITA had a pretty big itch to scratch in that area. Very
interesting clue...


> Anyway, my stance is that the incredibly flexible MOP classes provide
> general semantic usefulness, but Common Lisp does offer more constrained
> options that trade general usefulness for speed.
>

I agree with one caveat, in this area ANSI-CL pretty gratuitously went one
notch too far I'd say.

Regards,

Jean-Claude
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