Abstract Object Fault Handling for Persistent Programming Languages:

A key mechanism of a persistent programming lan-guage is its ability to detect and handle references to non-resident objects. Ideally, this mechanism should be hidden from the programmer, allowing the transparent manipulation of all data regardless of its potential life-time. We term such a mechanism object faulting, in a deliberate analogy with page faulting in virtual memory systems. This paper presents a number of mechanisms for detecting and handling references to persistent ob-jects, and evaluates their relative performance within an implementation of Persistent Smalltalk.