Stable name equality

[David Feuer]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2018, 4:32 AM Simon Peyton Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com>
wrote:

> That's explained in the paper. A StableName# is a pointer to a stable name
> object in the heap that *contains* an index into the stable name table.
> Basically, the garbage collector needs to know whether a stable name is
> alive or not, so it can work out when to clear it from the table.
>
> Very good.  But could it be explained in a Note too?  The paper is from a
> long time ago, contains lots of surrounding explanation, and might well be
> out of date (even if it in fact is not out of date).
>

Certainly there should be a note, but as I mentioned in this thread, I
think we can probably actually do better than we presently do.

>
> So the entry in the table /also/ points to the same, heap-allocated
> StableName#?   Doesn’t that keep it alive? Or is this akin to the treatment
> of weak pointers?   (Which is part of the same paper.)
>

The stable name table is not in the root set. All its references are weak.

>
> Do we anywhere keep a pointer to the object that this is a stable name of?
>
Yes. That's in the stable name table entry. It's also the key for the
stable name hash table.

>
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