Re: Proper breakthroughs/inventions.

From: Active8 (reply2group_at_ndbbm.net)
Date: 11/09/04 

Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 05:20:17 -0500

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 07:47:07 GMT, Kevin Aylward wrote:

> ChrisGibboGibson wrote:
<snip>
>> Virtual memory? An invention that would have no use whatsoever if PC
>> programmers learnt how to write software properly.
>
> I disagree. There are many valid reasons why virtual memory is pretty
> much indispensable for *good* code. For example, simply handling large
> data files, e.g. Spice output files. These could be 100's MB. One simple
> opens up the file, even if one doesn't have enough RAM.

Opening a file proves nothing. You have to read the file to get it
into memory. You know malloc will return NULL if there ain't enough
to satisfy your request and that a stack array will overflow. That
VirtualAlloc() was good for something, but often we can just read
parts of a file into memory and reuse it for the next chunk of data.

Maybe a better example of virtual memory is when I have these 20
some winders open and all those processes have to be swapped out to
swap space. It gets ugly when you're out of memory and swap space.
You can get a cup of tea (or a bigger HD) waiting for XP/2k to
increase the swap space.

> To write
> specialised code to handle this sort of thing would be very messy
> indeed.
>
> The real world is always going to have more data than RAM available to
> handle it, so its got nothing to do with poor software writing. Its just
> the way it is.
>

Until one finds the need to have it all in memory - parallel
processing. distributed computing, supercomputers, etc. 

-- 
Best Regards,
Mike