[Caml-list] String Problem

[Thomas Fischbacher <Thomas.Fischbacher@Physik.Uni-Muenchen.DE>]

Dear Caml hackers,

I am just doing some quite large (string theory) calculation which 
basically runs through a huge tree and does some computation at every 
node in ocaml which I have to parallelize in an effective way. My present 
approach is to set an alarm for the process doing the calculation, then 
splitting into chunks and serializing all the work that corresponds to 
nodes that have been touched but for which the calculation has not yet 
been finished. The serialized strings are then compressed and sent out via 
the net to other machines to help with the calculation.

I'd love to avoid temporary files, as these are not necessary, and my 
design is simpler and cleaner without having to worry about filesystem 
issues.

Now I encounter the problem that ocaml can only serialize to 
strings, but these are limited to 16 MB in size. If my data set (which is 
structured in a complicated way, i.e. it would be quite some effort to 
write specialized readers and printers) gets large enough, this entire 
approach therefore breaks down.

So, would it be that much of a problem to take the length information 
for strings out of the type word (I suppose that's the problem here) and 
use a proper 32-bit quantity on 32-bit machines here? I simply cannot 
believe it's not many more people experiencing similar difficulties with 
this 16 MB limitation on string lengths.


-- 
regards,               tf@cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de              (o_
 Thomas Fischbacher -  http://www.cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de/~tf  //\
(lambda (n) ((lambda (p q r) (p p q r)) (lambda (g x y)           V_/_
(if (= x 0) y (g g (- x 1) (* x y)))) n 1))                  (Debian GNU)

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