Resolving Metastability Issues During Bootstrapping

Abstract

The fact that CLOS is defined as a CLOS program introduces two categories of issues that must be addressed, namely bootstrapping issues and metastability issues [2]. Of the two, the latter is the more difficult one, and also the one that has the most negative impact on the elegance of the code in that it requires base cases to be handled specially. We describe satiation, a technique by which metastability issues can be turned into bootstrapping issues, thereby simplifying them and keeping the code elegant. Satiation consists of pre-loading the call history of a generic function with respect to a set of argument classes so that the base cases are handled without invoking the full protocol for computing the effective methods at runtime.