RawObject

Under the hood all managed objects in DartVM are called RawObjects, in true DartVM fashion these classes are all defined in a single 3,000 line file found at vm/raw_object.h.

In generated code you can access and move around RawObject*s however you want as long as you yield according to an incremental write barrier mask, the GC appears to be able to track references through passive scanning alone.

Here is the class tree:

RawInstances are the traditional Objects you pass around Dart code and invoke methods on, all of them have an equivalent type in dart land. Non-instance objects however are internal and only exist to leverage reference tracking and garbage collection, they do not have equivalent dart types.

Each object starts with a uint32_t containing the following tags:

Class IDs here are the same as before with cluster serialization, they are defined in vm/class_id.h but also include user-defined starting at kNumPredefinedCids.

Size and GC data tags are used for garbage collection, most of the time they can be ignored.

If the canonical bit is set that means that this object is unique and no other object is equal to it, like with Symbols and Types.

Objects are very light and the size of RawInstance is usually only 4 bytes, they surprisingly do not use virtual methods at all either.

All of this means allocating an object and filling in its fields can be done virtually for free, something we do quite lot in Flutter.