[kaffe] State of the Verifier

[Timothy Stack]

> 
> Hi Tim,

hi,

> After looking into backporting the JanosVM design, I've decided to leave
> the class loading system largely alone,

Thats cool...  As I was thinking about it more, the JanosVM changes are 
more useful for changes in the jitter than for verifying (Basically, you 
want to generate code 'optimal' code if the class is loaded, but you don't 
want to force loading either.)

> with the exception that loadClass
> will have a new parameter that allows you to specify to what target state
> a class should be loaded until.  The new method is called
> loadClassToState, and loadClass simply forwards a call to loadClassToState
> with the default target state.  The reason for this is that, during
> verification, if I really need to load a class, I don't want to link it
> (that can cause circular dependency problems when loading on the same
> thread),

I don't understand why this is a problem.

> but only get it to the point where I can see its superclass.  If
> you can see any problems with this, let me know.

You have no control over the state when user loaders are involved so you 
cannot rely on this behavior.  As it turns out, user loaders are another 
reason why trying to make a dummy class wouldn't work since you have no 
idea what the loader will return, it could be an existing class or a 
newly created one.

> Cheers,
> Rob

thanks for the update,

tim