On Thu, Nov 09, 2006 at 06:30:50PM +0000, Dário Abdulrehman wrote:
> I have a huge binary data file that I would like to memory map for intensive
> reading (no writing) with the best possible performance.
> I read some discussions about using BigArrays to achieve this in Ocaml.  I
> would like to know how this solution compares with the C language mmap.
> Please bear in mind I am a total newbie to Ocaml but I have good Common Lisp
> experience.

We use Bigarray to map geographical data.  It works.  As far as I'm
aware ArrayX.map_file is really just a wrapper around mmap, and read
accesses are just indirections on a pointer.

Depends a lot on what format your data is in.  Ours is stored as a
huge array of 16-bit signed ints and Bigarray supports that naturally.
If your data was in an unsupported format, or if it wasn't strictly an
array, you might end up doing contortions.

Rich.

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