Kurt Stephens

Abstract

I have been interested in optimal low-bit tag schemes on machine words in latently-typed languages. There are different schools of thought on how to handle the trade-offs between Fixnums (integers smaller than word size) and allocated objects.

Ian Piumarta’s libid object library is a very simple prototype-based object system with unresolved method delegation. It is used in the Pepsi/Coke COLA system (available at http://vpri.org/fonc_wiki/index.php/Sources) as the basis for all object representations and meta-behaviors. libid assumes that a reference to an object’s method table, or “vtable” resides at the word before the object’s address.