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.
@inproceedings{Hosking+1993OOPSLA,
author = {Hosking, Antony L. and Moss, J. Eliot B.},
title = {Object Fault Handling for Persistent Programming Languages:
A Performance Evaluation},
booktitle = {ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming,
Systems, Languages, and Applications},
series = {OOPSLA},
year = {1993},
pages = {288--303},
month = {September},
address = {Washington, DC},
doi = {10.1145/165854.165907},
acm = {http://dl.acm.org/authorize?N93672},
gscholar = {46}
}