[Gnash-dev] ObjectURI and stats

[Sandro Santilli]

- ObjectURI -

We now have an 'objecturi' branch on savannah.

The aim of the branch is to switch to an opaque handling of
property names so to allow for optimizations in lookups.

One such optimization (case-insensitive key for up to SWF6 movies)
is already implemented in the branch, and proved to be very effective
on interactive applications [1]. 

The focus now is on the opaque interface (ObjectURI).
ObjectURI objects identify property names (user-defined or system-defined).
Identifiers can be bound to a VM, as VM may perform optimizations and caching
over them which are specific to the SWFs being played.
Identifiers can always be compared in a case-sensitive or case-insensitive
way, independently of which SWF version contained them.

For the above scenario, we envisioned the concept of an URIManager
class providing constructors and comparators for ObjectURI.
The URIManager will be provided by the VM.
Constructors will be provided for string input (user-defined variables)
and NSV::namedString input (for system-defined variables). 
Comparators will be provided for equality and strict-weak-ordering
in both case-sensitive and case-insensitive flavors.

[1] http://wiki.gnashdev.org/WinterbellProfile

- Stats -

You'll also find in the branch support for statistics
gathering for property lookup.  You enable it
using  --with-statistics=proplookup switch at
configure time.

Those stats proved already very useful as they
showed how much of a pain is to call __resolve
for system events, which in turn helped finding
a bug [2].

[2] http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?31112

--strk;

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