From: Peter Suk <peter.kwangjun.suk@...>
Date: 2005-04-21T07:11:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Question on Singleton Classes (was: Seeing Metaclasses Clearly)


On Apr 20, 2005, at 4:57 PM, David A. Black wrote:

> Hi --
>
> On Thu, 21 Apr 2005, Jim Weirich wrote:
>
>> A question for those familiar with Ruby internals ... does an object's
>> singleton class exist from the moment the object is created, or does 
>> it
>> spring into existence the moment it is needed to hold singleton 
>> methods?
>
> I'm pretty sure it springs into existence for the purpose, just to
> avoid overpopulating object space with classes.  Otherwise there would
> be, say, 10000 class objects created for an array of 10000 one-byte
> strings, etc.  (This is based partly on some familiarity with
> internals and also memory of previous discussions with people with
> more familiarity with internals.)

That would be very hard on GC, since you'd also be creating 10000 new 
'roots' to start traversing from.

--Peter

--
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