Final Remarks

As interesting as this design is, there is one thing we have not done yet. We have not compared it to any existing reference finders in VisualWorks.

For example, the inspectors have a menu item called `[Inspect Reference Paths]`. Performing that action from an inspector looking at the class `Form` takes about 10 seconds in the image available to the author. After doing its work, it opens a series of arrays that, however, do not seem to track down the full reference path to the object in question. There are duplicates, some references are missing, and the paths do not start at a unique scan root.

Our reference finder, on the other hand, takes approximately the same amount of time, finds more references, and produces no duplicates. It seems we can claim our journey through the Smalltalk space is a success.