Moore's law and why persistence may not be necessary.

Stephen Pair spair at advantive.com
Wed Jan 23 16:25:53 UTC 2002


I think an OOZE/LOOM like thing for Squeak is very desirable.  It should
be generalized such that it is an object memory architecture supporting
two levels of storage, whatever those two levels might physically be.
It's certainly desirable for SqueakNOS (I can't imagine Squeak running
on bare hardware and constrained to only communicate with the disk via a
traditional file system like thing...ick!).  But, it's also desirable
without considering SqueakNOS.

- Stephen

> -----Original Message-----
> From: squeak-dev-admin at lists.squeakfoundation.org 
> [mailto:squeak-dev-admin at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On 
> Behalf Of Cees de Groot
> Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 11:23 AM
> To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Subject: Re: Moore's law and why persistence may not be necessary.
> 
> 
> Scott A Crosby <crosby at qwes.math.cmu.edu> said:
> >But, fullGC has *no locality* and will just *die*.
> >
> I doubt it - at least under Linux. I used to run a UUCP/Fido 
> gateway with Cnews on a 386 with 4Mb RAM when Linux just 
> appeared. The daily newsspool cleanup job (where Cnews wanted 
> all sorts of stuff in core) started at 4am and the machine 
> trashed until well after lunch every day ;-)
> 
> >And, does squeak *really* need a persistence engine, other than the 
> >image? Who, unless they're storing multimedia into the 
> image, is going 
> >to have an image that big in practice? Multimedia can be 
> easily dumped 
> >into ImageSegments.
> >
> I think it does. Clearly, your full-text thing would benefit 
> for ease of use. I think that saving the image is too slow 
> and too big a hammer for saving, say, a new contact - 
> especially if you're living in a big multi-hundred-megabyte image.
> 
> Plus, if SqueakNOS is to become a reality, it either needs a 
> filesystem or something else to put all the stuff that Squeak 
> currently uses the filesystem for (like, err, storing 
> ImageSegments :-)). 
> 
> Now, I'm a complete idiot w.r.t. the object memory, so maybe 
> it is possible to save only dirty chunks and do some 
> memory-mapping like activities so that the above things would 
> be possible. I'll start to talk about transactions in that case ;-). 
> 
> This discussion probably slowly moves into the direction of a 
> philosophical discussion. Is the object memory an object 
> database? Should it be extended that way? Think SqueakNOS: 
> just an image that fills, say, a harddisk partition or flash 
> drive? Or an image plus all sorts of stuff on a Squeak-based 
> filesystem/OODB external to the image?
> 
> >I learned an important lesson from a friend. Computers are 
> getting so 
> >much better, than many times old decisions should be 
> rethought out. I 
> >see this lesson all over the place, from the delayed Itanium, to 
> >diskbasing a dbase. Wait too long, and your design decisions 
> are crap. 
> >:)
> >
> I agree. The requirements (persistence, transactions) won't 
> change, however. Just the solutions implemented to satisfy 
> the requirements.
> 
> -- 
> Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     
> <cg at cdegroot.com>
> GnuPG 1024D/E0989E8B 0016 F679 F38D 5946 4ECD  1986 F303 937F 
> E098 9E8B
> 




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