On Fri, 4 Feb 2005, Oliver Bandel 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...
> 
> Well, maybe there should be a BigStrings- or LongStrings-Module
> introduced into OCaml-stdlib?

Well, there is something for opaque binary data, but the problem is that 
not all functions one would like to have on them are readily available.

> But: When you mean with "a long and complicated calculation"
> using larger int/float-values you may use
> the num-library.

No, I actually meant serializing an approximation-to-a-continuation in 
long running symbolic calculations that accumulate quite a sizable heap of 
expressions representing terms, say for checkpointing.

> E.g. in module Num there is a  string_of_num-function.
> Do you really think, the results will be larger than 16MB?

In my case, I indeed had precisely this problem of some serializations 
failing due to data breaking the 16MB limit.

Oh, by the way, I also have indications that at least for 3.07, there is a 
bug in serializing and re-serializing hash tables. Unfortunately, my test 
case is quite complicated, and I so far could not strip it down to 
something more useful for debuggers.

-- 
regards,               tf@cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de              (o_
 Thomas Fischbacher -  http://www.cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de/~tf  //\
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