Re: [Caml-list] Array 4 MB size limit

[Jozef Kosoru <zyzstar@uid0.sk>]

On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 22:57:30 -0700, Frederick Akalin wrote:
> >Historical digression: this representation decision was initially
> >taken when designing Caml Light in 1989-1990.  At that time, even
> >professional workstations ... Little did I know that the 32-bitters
> >would survive so long.  Now, it's 2006, and 64-bit processors are
> >becoming universally available, in desktop machines at least.  (I've
> >been running an AMD64 PC at home since january 2005 with absolutely
> >zero problems.)  So, no the data representations of OCaml are not
> >going to change to lift the array size limit on 32-bit machines.
>  
> I see. This is a perfectly reasonable explanation.  I ended up just
> using Bigarrays of floats for now and converting from those to 3-d
> vectors on demand (what I need), but it would be nice to have a type
> that wraps around Array that can get around the 4M limit (using an
> array of arrays like someone suggested earlier).  It's sad, but I
> think 32-bit is going to be around for a while, and surely I can't be
> the only person to run up against this. :) Not that I mind writing
> such a library and releasing it.  I wonder if the Extlib guys would be
> interested...

Yes. 32-bit x86 platform is not going away anytime soon. Given that 512M
RAM is now standard and 1G RAM is very common for an average PC - having
a programming language with 4M limit for the array size is like to have
an 8+3 characters filename limitation on a filesystem using a mainstream
300G disk in 2006. However I understand the techical difficulty to solve
this issue - it's pretty annoying anyhow :)

Jozef

-- 
jozef kosoru
http://zyzstar.kosoru.com