On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 11:39:50PM +0000, Richard Jones wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 04, 2005 at 12:22:47AM +0100, Thomas Fischbacher wrote:
> > Oh, by the way, there is one more thing which I consider a really
> > grave issue, which gave us quite a lot of grey hair already: Ocaml 
> > strings have this stupid limitation to 16 MB, which means in particular 
> > that if you serialize a truly large intermediate state of, say, a long 
> > and complicated calculation which accidentally got a bit larger than this 
> > limit (while you did not expect that), well...
> 
> Got to agree with you on this one ...  At least we'll soon all be
> using 64 bit computers where OCaml doesn't suffer this limitation.

Well, but even on those computers will be restrictions in the size.
And I'm sure that with more powerful computers, there will be
more ressource-needing applications/calculations/computations
and so maybe there will be another problem then (maybe it needs
some decades to reach that limit?).

Is the 16MB string-length really a hardware-dependency?
Maybe changing string-representation could help even
on 32 Bit machines to have not such a problem.
But maybe a BigStrings/LongStrings-module would do that
better (because changing the string-representation in the OCaml-core
may be a harder problem...?!)

Ciao,
   Oliver