We present an approach to supporting persistence in heap-based programming languages, called object faulting. By modifying the language run-time system, we provide the illusion of a large heap of objects, only some of which are actually resident in memory. When the run-time system detects a reference to the contents of a non-resident object, an object fault occurs, causing the object to be made resident. We discuss an implementation of these techniques for Smalltalk that uses the Mneme persistent object store as the underlying storage manager.
@techreport{Hosking+1990TR,
author = {Hosking, Antony L. and Moss, J. Eliot B. and Bliss, Cynthia},
title = {Design of an Object Faulting Persistent Smalltalk},
institution = {University of Massachusetts at Amherst},
year = {1990},
type = {Technical Report},
number = {UM-CS-1990-045},
month = {May},
url = {https://web.cs.umass.edu/publication/docs/1990/UM-CS-1990-045.pdf},
gscholar = {13}
}