On 6 Dec 2004, at 14:55, GoldPython wrote:
Question: Should the Haskell runtime enviroment provide swapping services for large objects?
I can't immediately see why the haskell runtime should be able to guess better than the underlying VM how to handle memory: might as well leave that to the OS. Unless you're not running on an OS with VM, I suppose... If you were really writing an editor in haskell for larger-than-memory files, I imagine you would have a structure which is lazily-read-from-disk, so that only actual changes need storing in memory. Further more at idle time you can write out unsaved changes to disk (to a temporary file, of course, not the main file) and thus stop memory usage creeping up. This could all be quite fast and efficient (perhaps slightly more so if we had an interface to mmap()). Jules