[TCLCORE] Re: Hintermayer's string allocation patch

[Brent W. <we...@aj...>]

>>>"George Howlett" said:

 > While I think Gerhard's realloc mods sound very good, I reiterate my
 > question.  Where do you need a a 1 Gigabyte string?  (BTW, that's 1/2
 > of a 32-bit address space).
 > 
 > Please don't fix Tcl's growth scheme until it's broken.  First, make
 > the case for all the applications that this change fixes.  Otherwise
 > this is another Tcl pseudo-improvement.

>>> Brent Welch said:
> Apparently MacOS is more advanced than UNIX in this area.  In UNIX you
> have to be able to allocate the swap space to cover the virtual
> memory.  So, in practice, if you have 300 Meg of swap space, 192 Meg
> of real memory, and a 160 Meg string, you cannot append one byte to it
> in Tcl. 

So, it is broken.  It is not that we cannot allocate a 1 or 2 Gig string,
it is that we may not even be able to grow a Tcl string that will
fit into physical memory/swap space.

Also, if you look at the patch, it replaces like 8 lines with 16 lines,
and by tuning the "large size" limit and the growth chunk size, we
can make the performance hit for things over the "large size" acceptable.

Can we be done with this now?

--	Brent Welch	<we...@aj...>
	http://www.ajubasolutions.com
	Scriptics changes to Ajuba Solutions
	scriptics.com => ajubasolutions.com


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