Re: [Caml-list] Faking concurrency using Unix forks and pipes (ray tracing results)

[Brian Hurt <bhurt@janestcapital.com>]

Jonathan Bryant wrote:

>
> On Jun 4, 2007, at 12:33 PM, Benedikt Grundmann wrote:
>
>>
>> It looks a bit more complex, but that's just to avoid big strings in
>> case of big messages
>> (e.g. with the "simple" interface you end up with the "same" content
>> in memory twice).
>
>
> I think big strings are unavoidable in this case.  They can be broken  
> up at the protocol level for sending, but a large data structure is  
> going to be marshaled into a big string.  As far as same content in  
> memory twice, that should be the case for pure values even in a  
> regular OCaml program.  As for mutable values, they shouldn't be sent  
> over a channel to begin with.  Once channels are available though,  
> creating a synchronous mutable cell is only a few lines of code.   
> (Check out Reppy's book/papers).


I'm wondering if inversion of control isn't an answer here.  The idea is 
to have a function of type buf_t -> string -> unit.  Instead of building 
up a giant string, the of_* functions would call this function on small 
strings.  Not unlike Buffers. But instead of building up in memory, 
these function would fill a buffer and then send it off.

Brian