Re: [TCLCORE] Re: Hintermayer's string allocation patch

[Mark H. <ma...@us...>]

Andreas Kupries <a.k...@we...> wrote:
> I go with George and John here, i.e. allocate until you the wall and
> then retract from the boundary to fill the rest in smaller
> increments.

I also concur with this...

Joe English <jen...@fl...> wrote:
> If it has the potential to
> adversely affect the performance of Tcl programs
> by a quadratic factor (which I believe it does),
> it shouldn't be applied.

...and this.

Eric Melski <er...@aj...> wrote:
> Again, I urge everybody not to get hung up on the performance issue and
> consider the memory issue:  without _some_ kind of change, Tcl simply
> cannot use all available memory.

I disagree with this.  It is not a good tradeoff.  In addition, if an
application has a requirement to deal with data this size, there are
probably better solutions than shuffling strings around in swap space.

Amusing anecdote:  DSC Communications had exactly one customer problem
report related to Tcl in five years.  A programmer had attempted to
use a text widget to watch log data, but didn't get the code write
to delete the oldest test lines, so the text data kept growing.  After
about 3 days, the machine ran out of swap, and the other processes in
the system started to die -- but the text widget process kept going with
no problem.  It's the only trouble I've ever seen complaining that a
program was too robust.

Mark.

--
Mark Harrison                          AsiaInfo Holdings, Inc.
ma...@us...                Beijing/Santa Clara