Something I would like to see appear in the OCaml libraries, and I don't
have it yet myself, is the use of Copy-on-Write and Scatter-Gather applied
to large mutable objects such as BigArrays. When a request to copy the
object arrives, it is immediately satisfied in mere nanoseconds, delaying
the actual copying operation until (if ever) some code attempts to mutate
one of the cells. Actual copying would frequently be a huge undertaking and
costing a great deal in runtime performance.

The Scatter-Gather would be useful in managing arrays where only a small
part of the array has actually been mutated. Perhaps some kind of frame
paging applied to the array proper. That way the COW only has to replicate
small portions of the array for the user who requested a copy.

David McClain
Senior Corporate Scientist
Avisere, Inc.

+1.520.390.7738 (USA)
david.mcclain@avisere.com



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