[Haskell-cafe] Re: Re: Hugs vs GHC (again)was: Re: Somerandomnewbiequestions

[Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk]

Pete Chown <1 at 234.cx> writes:

>> of course, [mmap] can only be done on a limited type of file on some
>> architectures, so it should be an optimization under the hood rather
>> than an exposed interface.
>
> In particular, you have to be careful not to run out of address space on
> 32-bit architectures.  If you try to do file access by mapping the whole
> file into virtual memory, you won't be able to handle files larger than 2G
> or so.  You also have to be careful not to map a number of file chunks,
> which in total exceed the address space available.

Which means that it *should* be explicit, rather than done under the
hood. It's a tradeoff, the programmer should be aware when to apply it,
the runtime should not impose a policy which would be hard to reverse.

-- 
   __("<         Marcin Kowalczyk
   \__/       qrczak at knm.org.pl
    ^^     http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/