Object Fault Handling for Persistent Programming Languages: A Performance Evaluation

Abstract

A key mechanism of a persistent programming language is its ability to detect and handle references to non-resident objects.Ideally, this mechanism should be hidden from the programmer, allowing the transparent manipulation of all data regardless of its potential lifetime.We term such a mechanism object faulting, in a deliberate analogy with page faulting in virtual memory systems.This paper presents a number of mechanisms for detecting and handling references to persistent objects, and evaluates their relative performance within an implementation of Persistent Smalltalk.