[swift-dev] Shrinking the heap object header

[Greg Parker]

> On Jan 15, 2016, at 4:21 PM, Greg Parker via swift-dev <swift-dev at swift.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Jan 15, 2016, at 10:58 AM, Joe Groff <jgroff at apple.com <mailto:jgroff at apple.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> we could use a layout similar to this to pack the remaining information into 8 bytes:
>> 
>> bits   meaning
>> -----  -------
>> 63     not refcounted
>> 47…62  strong refcount
>> 03…46  metadata pointer
>> 02     (reserved)
>> 01     deallocating
>> 00     pinned
> 
> Note that the memory analysis folks really want a few bits reserved with a constant value. That improves their reliability when distinguishing real objects from non-object memory that happens to have an isa-like field in front. ObjC currently gives them 6 bits on all architectures.

To clarify: Analysis tools like `heap` and `leaks` need to distinguish real objects from other heap allocations. The false positive rate is tolerable if the isa field is a raw pointer. (As long as some other code like libobjc itself deliberately disguises some of its own data structures that would otherwise look like false positives.)

Non-pointer isa greatly increases the false positive rate. There is too much non-object data that happens to match some real class pointer when only the class bits can be examined. Adding some constant non-zero bits brings it back down again. 


-- 
Greg Parker     gparker at apple.com     Runtime Wrangler


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-dev/attachments/20160115/cee494bf/attachment.html>