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A comment on Interface Dispatch (2018).

Re:Interface Dispatch (2018) by abecedarius on Thursday April 18, 2019 @03:35PM (#19694099)
I'm curious about the history of the fat-pointer approach. The first exposition I personally ran across was http://erights.org/enative/fatpointers.html in the 90s. Can anyone point out others?
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Re:Interface Dispatch (2018) by cross_wiber on Friday April 19, 2019 @04:22PM (#19702676)
The earliest one I know of is in the Emerald programming language. There is a brief description of the technique in http://www.emeraldprogramminglanguage.org/OOPSLA-86-paper.pd... from 1986.

See http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.103... for more history and description of the implementation. From that paper: "The run-time system constructed an AbCon for each <type, implementation> pair that it encountered. An object reference consisted not of a single pointer, but of a pair of pointers: a pointer to the object itself, and a pointer to the appropriate AbCon". (Called an AbCon because it "mapped Abstract operations to Concrete implementations.)

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Re:Interface Dispatch (2018) by abecedarius on Friday April 19, 2019 @04:46PM (#19702866)
Great find! Thanks.
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