Standardising access to internals.

[Steve Poole <sp...@googlemail.com>]

As we know all dump types are different in the sorts of data that they
contain and how they are presented.

There are a couple of use cases that say that some users will want to be
able to see the underlying bits and bytes for an entity in the API.   There
is a  scenario where the users are  those who can understand these bits and
bytes and are examining the contents for specific internal failures.
There is a more general use case where the relative sizes of the entities on
the API need to be examined - for instance in working out the native memory
component.

The API is currently inconsistent in how and where it makes this information
available.

I'd like to work out a consistent mechanism for data access.  We should also
consider the fact that there may be dump types where access to the internal
bytes  is not acceptable or feasible.

I'd like to explore use cases for getting at the underlying data behind the
Java abstraction that is our API ...


Cheers

Steve