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?
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.)
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.)