[Haskell-cafe] Practical Question: Large memory items

[Jules Bean]

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