Previously, I used a shell script to extract modification date ranges
from the Git history, but that was complicated and unreliable, so now
every file just gets the same year range in its copyright header. If
someone needs to know when a specific file was modified and by whom,
they can look at the Git history themselves; no need to include it
redundantly in the header.
The main change here is to use a lazily-populated vector to associate
runtime data with classes instead of referencing them directly from
the class which requires updating immutable references in the heap
image. The other changes employ other strategies to avoid trying to
update immutable references.
In order to facilitate making the VM compatible with multiple class
libraries, it's useful to separate the VM-specific representation of
these classes from the library implementations. This commit
introduces VMClass, VMField, and VMMethod for that purpose.