Ease Virtual Machine Level Tooling with Language Level Ordinary Object Pointers

Explore a 25-minute conference talk from ACM SIGPLAN that addresses the challenges of virtual machine (VM) level tooling in object-oriented programming languages. Learn about the concept of language level ordinary object pointers (LLOOP) and how they can bridge the abstraction gap between VM-level operations and language-level constructs. Discover the implementation of LLOOP in the Pharo language and examine two real-world case studies where this approach was used to solve major bugs. Follow along as the speakers demonstrate how LLOOP enabled them to repair a broken Pharo environment by tracking and fixing a language-level method error at the VM level. Additionally, gain insights into how this technique was applied to identify and remove corrupted objects in a Pharo image, ultimately restoring the environment to working order.

[VMIL'22] Ease Virtual Machine Level Tooling with Language Level Ordinary Object Pointers