Re: PackageOrganizerCache - Moose-dev

27 Oct 2010

On 27 oct. 2010, at 16:27, Cyrille Delaunay wrote:

...
  Hello,

 I'm currently looking at the use of the PackageOrganizerCache in Moose. 
 There was some work in pharo about a new, more performant, better-structured (I think
it's the idea ? :)) 'Package system' called RPackage.
 So before doing anything, I would like to know more about the use of
PackageOrganizerCache:
 - Why do we use a cache ? I guess this is because accessing directly parent packages of
specific classes or methods was to slow using the current package system.
 - If this is the good answer :), why was it too long? could another package system
(RPackage) solve this problem and avoid us to use a cache ?  
 - For which kind of task is used the packageCache in Moose? I saw that it was used at the
import of smalltalk code, to link classes and method to their parent package, is that all
? 
Basically, yes, yes, and yes.

The current package system (PackageOrganizer + PackageInfo) is reeeally slow for some
tasks, like computing package of methods (to detect class extensions), and it really
brought down the Smalltalk importer to its knee on even not so large models. The big
problem now is linking the package organizer to system events, so that it updates itself
whenever a package is added, renamed, removed, changed... This was not done with
PackageOrganizerCache because it's a bit difficult and because it was just a
workaround at the time. Now RPackage should replace the current organizer and has to take
care of such events. It also appear that RPackage initializes itself faster than
PackageOrganizerCache (probably because it's more clever in its usage of PackageInfo
API).

Anyway, it's a problem specific to the Smalltalk importer, not to Moose or Famix in
general.

--
 Simon