Hi Avi,

since a swap (page) file has a disk component, it is possibly sufficient  
to just allocate from the OS's virtual memory, as part of the [enhanced]  
primitive. Then the code which now works on the pre-allocate WordArray  
might be reused as-is. Of course the swap (page) file size must reflect  
the corresponding OS memory allocation. Besides code re-use, speed might  
be another advantage when using the OS's virtual memory services.

/Klaus

On Tue, 19 Dec 2006 08:30:37 +0100, Avi Bryant wrote:

> Here's a speed/memory tradeoff that would help me a lot if I was able
> to choose it: currently, the primitive that builds an image segment
> requires a pre-allocated WordArray.  If you're creating an image
> segment of a significant portion of the data in the image, this
> effectively doubles your image size (or more, because it
> over-allocates).  It would be great to have a version of this
> primitive that used a file instead.  I realize that there's a lot of
> random access of the buffer that goes on, which means that a
> file-based prim is going to be a *lot* slower than the memory based
> one, but in some cases I'm willing to pay that price to keep the image
> size low.
>
> If someone is up for writing this prim, I'm happy to compensate them
> for their time.
>
> Cheers,
> Avi
>
>