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Re: Reading portions of large files
From: |
Lee Sau Dan |
Subject: |
Re: Reading portions of large files |
Date: |
20 Jan 2003 08:50:31 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) Emacs/20.7 |
>>>>> "Stefan" == "Stefan Monnier <foo@acm.com>"
>>>>> <monnier+gnu.emacs.help/news/@flint.cs.yale.edu> writes:
Stefan> Since at least 1 bit of tag is needed, that means that to
Stefan> get 31bit integers we'd need to move the mark bit
Stefan> somewhere else. XEmacs decided to use 3-word cons cells
Stefan> (and I know they're still regularly wondering whether it
Stefan> was a good idea). Another approach is to use a separate
Stefan> mark-bit array.
I think the separate mark-bit array would be cleaner. You don't need
to access the mark bits unless you're doing gc. Why let that bit
stick there in the _main_ working set all the time? Wouldn't a
separate mark-bit array also improve locality (important for caching)?
Then, in theory, the tag bits can also be kept separately, giving the
full 32 bits to integers (represented as machine-native words). I
think we only need 1 tag bit in the separate tag-bit array. Its
function is to indicate whether the corresponding memory word is an
integer or not. If not, then the remaining tag bits are found in the
word itself. And integer arithmetic can certainly be faster!
Would this implementation be more efficient or worse?
Stefan> Lots of trade offs, a fair bit of coding, even more
Stefan> testing, ... Anybody interested is welcome to tried it
Stefan> out. My opinion is that maybe it would be nice, but since
Stefan> the only application I'm aware of is "editing files
Stefan> between 128MB and 1GB on 32bit systems", I don't think
Stefan> it's worth the trouble.
Yeah. I share this last point with you. >128MB text files are simply
weird. And for binary file, a real hex editor (or 'xxd', which I just
discovered) is a more appropriate tool, or just 'dd'.
--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦(Big5) ~{@nJX6X~}(HZ)
E-mail: danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
- Re: Reading portions of large files, (continued)
- Re: Reading portions of large files, David Kastrup, 2003/01/09
- Re: Reading portions of large files, Eli Zaretskii, 2003/01/10
- Message not available
- Re: Reading portions of large files, Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>, 2003/01/13
- Re: Reading portions of large files, Miles Bader, 2003/01/13
- Re: Reading portions of large files, Miles Bader, 2003/01/13
- Re: Reading portions of large files, David Kastrup, 2003/01/13
- Re: Reading portions of large files, Miles Bader, 2003/01/13
- Re: Reading portions of large files,
Lee Sau Dan <=
- Re: Reading portions of large files, Mac, 2003/01/24
- Re: Reading portions of large files, Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>, 2003/01/27
Re: Reading portions of large files, Eric Pement, 2003/01/10
Re: Reading portions of large files, Brendan Halpin, 2003/01/10
Re: Reading portions of large files, Lee Sau Dan, 2003/01/20