Typed Objects Status Report

I recently wrote up a paper describing the current version of the Typed Objects API. Anyone who is interested in the current state of the art in that specification should take a look. It’s not too long and intended to be an easy read. This is just a draft copy, and feedback is naturally very welcome – in particular, I expect that before we submit it, the implementation section will change, since it will be much further along.

Dmitry and I have also been hard at work on the actual specification itself and naturally I’ve been working on the implementation too. The most significant deviation between the current implementation and the intended specification is described by Bug 973238 – basically the way we handle arrays is not right. I’m about 16 patches into the process of fixing that: it affects a lot of code and I’m trying to do it carefully. Overall, though, the new model is making the code much cleaner, so I’m excited about that.

I’ve also been working on an upcoming blog post describing an extension to typed objects that supports value types – that is, immutable objects representing small, identity-less values like colors, points, and so forth. That should be coming soon. It’ll build on the API described in the draft paper, so you might want to read that first. ;)