Abstract

The Meroon object system was originally invented for a book to describe implementations of Lisp and Scheme. It was designed to have a pedagogical but efficient implementation, to support separate compilation yet to be powerful enough to unify all the datatypes of Scheme even vectors and strings without restriction of inheritance. While designing a distributed extension of Scheme [QD93], new needs appeared that a new release of Meroon tries to satisfy. This paper exposes these problems and how they are solved in Meroon V3. Among these new features are (i) compact dispatchers for generic functions, (ii) a new initialization protocol for a better control of mutability, (iii) a new vision of metaclasses as a code generation mechanism in relation to separate compilation. The paper first recalls the previous state of Meroon, presents the new needs then their associated solutions.

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