That looks great thanks, I'll look into it !

J


On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 2:10 PM, Gerd Stolpmann <info@gerd-stolpmann.de>wrote:

> Am Dienstag, den 05.11.2013, 18:07 +0100 schrieb Jean Krivine:
> > Dear all
> >
> >
> > I am developing a graph rewriting algorithm which operates on large
> > graphs. Because of the large data structure the GC becomes quite
> > inefficient for two reasons that I am inferring:
> > 1/ there is no correlation between the time of allocation of an object
> > and its likelihood to be garbage collected.
> > 2/ even when there is nothing to collect, I guess that the GC is still
> > inspecting the heap.
> >
> >
> > Point 1 is inducing some memory leak and point 2 is just inefficient.
> > I think I took care of point 1 by using my own allocation heap (so
> > there is nothing to collect for the GC). But to take care of point 2 I
> > guess I need to tell the GC that my heap (an extensible array) should
> > not be inspected.
> >
> >
> > As far as I understand there is a module Ancient which I can use to
> > tell the GC to ignore my array but, if I understand well, it would
> > only work if I use my array in a read only fashion.
> > I also thought I could use Bigarray, but it seems it can only be used
> > for basic array types.
> >
> >
> > To summarize my question: is there a (reasonable) way to implement an
> > 'a array out of the ocaml heap ?
>
> Yes, but it's cumbersome. I did that for the Netmulticore library of
> Ocamlnet.
>
> Here are the basics: You can have a pointer from the normal heap to
> other memory, and the GC will not follow it. You cannot have pointers
> the other way round, because the GC may move in-heap memory, and there
> is no mechanism to update such inverse pointers.
>
> In Ocamlnet you find the required support functions in
>
> http://projects.camlcity.org/projects/dl/ocamlnet-3.7.3/doc/html-main/Netsys_mem.html.
> This functionality shares the same basic ideas of Ancient, but is more
> complete, and especially supports read-write modifications of out-of-heap
> values in a reasonable way. Out-of-heap memory is here encapsulated as
> bigarrays. With Netsys_mem.init_array you can initialize bigarrays so their
> contents can be interpreted as Ocaml array. With Netsys_mem.init_value you
> can copy arbitrary values to bigarrays (i.e. for initializing/setting the
> elements of the array). Netsys_mem.as_value returns the pointer to the
> structure in the bigarray as "normal" OCaml value pointer.
>
> E.g.
>
> type elem = { n : int }
> type arr = elem array
>
> let mem_size = 100000
> let arr_size = 10
> let mem =
>   Bigarray.Array1.create Bigarray.char Bigarray.c_layout mem_size
> let (offs,blen) =
>   Netsys_mem.init_array mem 0 arr_size
> let arr_ooh =
>   Netsys_mem.as_value mem offs
>
> Now arr_ooh contains invalid pointers (which doesn't matter for the
> moment because the GC will not inspect them). Here is how to set all
> elements to some contents:
>
> let next = ref blen
> for k = 0 to arr_size-1 do
>   let v = { n = 5*k } in   (* some random contents *)
>   let (v_offs, v_blen) =
>     Netsys_mem.init_value mem !next v [] in
>   let v_ooh =
>     Netsys_mem.as_value mem v_offs in
>   arr_ooh.(k) <- v_ooh;      (* out-of-heap assignment, see below *)
>   next := !next + v_blen
> done
>
> Of course, you need to do your own memory-management here (there are
> higher-level functions in Ocamlnet for that, see the Netmulticore
> library).
>
> So finally you get an initialized out-of-heap array arr_ooh residing
> within the bigarray.
>
> The assignment arr_ooh.(k) <- v_ooh needs some further discussion. Until
> OCaml-4.00.1 this was fully supported by the OCaml runtime. OCaml-4.01.0
> includes a change that disallows to modify out-of-heap memory with
> normal OCaml assignment operators. Ocamlnet contains a workaround (which
> works by overriding the changed caml_initialize and caml_modify
> functions with their old definitions), and it is automatically enabled
> if you add -package netmulticore at link time. The workaround is
> incompatible with non-custom bytecode links, though.
>
> Gerd
>
>
> >
> >
> > Thanks!
> > JK
>
> --
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Gerd Stolpmann, Darmstadt, Germany    gerd@gerd-stolpmann.de
> My OCaml site:          http://www.camlcity.org
> Contact details:        http://www.camlcity.org/contact.html
> Company homepage:       http://www.gerd-stolpmann.de
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>