[Freecats-Dev] Object Prevalence (cont.)

[Henri Chorand]

No way to avoid Yves' well-known and devastating sense of humor...

> > The idea is to forget, once and for all, about databases, by keeping
> > all data in RAM (it should work for any reasonably sized TM, where
> > the worst I saw yet was around 20 Mb)
>
> There was a time (1983) when an IBM PC had one floppy disc and
> 32Kbytes RAM.
> The floppy looked huge. The super-professional version had 2
> floppies so you could use "large" databases.
>
> Then the first hard disks, around 10 or 20 Megabytes arrived (RAM
> exploded to around 384 Kytes), so you could use really "large"
> databases.
>
> Then they broke the 32-Mb hard disk barrier, and 100 Megabytes
> was the order of the day (with RAM at 640 Kbytes+ extensions).
>
> Gee then they had discs holding 1 Gigabyte (they said: people
> will *never* use that much) and RAM around 24 megabytes
> (who needs that much?).
>
> Etc :-)

Yeah, and everyone should still remember when his Billness claimed nobody
would ever need more than 640 KB.

> Now our processors have more on-chip level-1 cache than the first
> PC's mass storages. Henri, by the time you/we finish programming,
> they'll say, no-one uses a 20-Mb translation memory- what is it
> worth? You really begin getting leverage with 100 gigabytes, man.

Prove it, then - on your FTP site, preferrably, mine is too minuscule for
this  :-))
Now I'm thinking about it, I know a translator who's working on a 4 million
TUs TM - and it's a nightmare with Trados, of course ;-)


More seriously, my point was more along the following lines:

- Objects are handy to play with (and it generally requires less coding than
lots of what's associated with the olde ways of programming).

- The Slashdot article I pointed explained how it was possible, under
certain circumstances, to do AS IF you were putting all your data in RAM,
enabling developers to do a number of things with very few lines of code. In
our case, it does look feasible in most current situations.

- Of Course [Oeuf Corse], at some stage, the memory cache managed by the
filesystem will intervene, but aren't the tradoffs of this solution worth
considering?
For instance, we all know that (good) (R)DBMS do have caches implemented in
them, it's only that we don't want to use a DBMS in the first place.

My 2 (cached) Euro Cents...

Henri