[Alephmodular-devel] Memory Management and files

[Br'fin <br...@ma...>]

I was working through shapes_macintosh.cpp, driving the eeevil FSSpec  
from it when I ended up debating a tangent.

Shapes (And sounds) use variants of a function that essentially  
allocate a Handle and read a section of data into it. (It's almost a  
wonder to me that there wasn't a short entry in something like the  
CSeries for such a function and let it be used multiple places...)

At any rate, I got into poking through some resources online to see if  
it was worth holding onto the Handles at all on the MacOS X side of  
things. (It isn't according to this:  
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/ 
Performance/VirtualMemory/Allocating__eing_Memory.html)

And as a further sidetrack I got into wondering if we wanted to support  
memory mapping for large files. (shapes, sounds, maps) Where OSX/BSD  
and presumably linux have mmap and Windows (later versions) has its own  
method.

Though I realize that the memory mapping variation may need to support  
a fallback method.

-Jeremy Parsons