Re: What is transient metadata ?

Holger Krug wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 11:24:51AM +0000, Tomas Zezula wrote:
> 
>>So, Java module requires that these objects will be freed automatically 
>>when they are not more referenced.
> 
> I understand. MDR is going to be a meta-data repository with
> integrated garbage collection. Quite funny.
> 
Yeah, it's funny :-) But needed as well. At least I hope that we didn't
push in the wrong direction.
We (== java module maintainers) plan to model the whole user
java projects w/ all the referencies to the JDK (and other library)
classes. That will give us a *lot* of metadata to care about. When we
did some guesses about # of instances, we got a number around a million,
so we have to somehow trim down the amount of persistent data otherwise
we would make a big favour to harddisk manufacturers.
The metadata, which cannot be perceived outside local scope (e.g. local
variables, statements, ...) will be modelled using the transient
metadata support. So a client will be able to ask for the detailed model
and manipulate it using JMI, but it won't be preserved after the client
will be finished with it (actually since the changes will be written
into the source, they will survive in some form).

Here the MDR machinery serves as a framework, which does most of the
boring things we would have to code by hand for each part of the
detailed model.

-Svata