🚀 go-pugleaf

lron@easy.HIAM (Dwight Hubbard) writes:
[lots of other good thoughts from several folks omitted:]
>Exactly, but wouldn't it be better to work on getting AmigaDos applications to
>run under the new version of Unix.  It does have virtual memory and has been
>mentioned before virtual memory and real time performance just don't go
>together on a 68000.

Envision an editor that defaults to a 60KByte edit buffer, but goes into
software virtual memory mode for larger files, and which I can control to
open the memory buffer to a couple of megabytes if it is available and not
needed to satisfy contention from background processes.  Now I have great
performance on small files, pretty good performance on big files, and, while
things may slow down a lot, it is still _possible_ to edit any file I can
fit a copy of into my available hard drive space.  It is that quality of
still being possible to edit large files that makes the effort to install
software virtual memory worthwhile.

The situation I mentioned a week back in this thread, of editing a 3.5MByte
file, was done on a fast MS-DOS box and a fast disk, and while a global
substitution might take 20 seconds, going to a particular line in the file
never took more than two.  It is certainly possible for a clever programmer
to make the performance acceptable for a particular task by careful design
and tuning, and if the same cleverness is then isolated into a library, it
is there for all programmers to use.

Kent, the man from xanth.
<xanthian@Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian@well.sf.ca.us>