[Rusky]

I guess a better way to put it is, if you got Lox working with RefCells, then you didn't need RefCells (or their overhead) to begin with - you must not have been holding those dynamic borrows any longer than a single VM instruction, or something close to that.

[ltungv]

Yes, the borrows were only held for roughly a single instruction. But I don't see how you can mutate the Table/HashMap of fields in an object with only Cell tho

[Rusky]

Technically it is possible to swap the HashMap out of the Cell, mutate it, and put it back, but that is maybe even worse than the RefCell.

What I would expect a production language implementation to do is build its own table that integrates its solution for interior mutability into its design. There are several other things (e.g. iterators, concurrent GC) that will also contribute to the need for a custom table, so (again for a production language) this is not too crazy.

[ltungv]

Ah! I could imagine a table backed by an array of Cell since all the possible values in that table implement Copy. There is probably a better way for the table to have interior immutability. But I think I get what you were saying.