dynamic allocation file buffer

[Paul Boddie]

On Sep 10, 5:03 am, George Sakkis <george.sak... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So at best (i.e. if it actually makes any sense; I didn't read it),
> this is an ANNouncement of a pre-alpha piece of code. ANN posts rarely
> attract replies, even when they are about production/stable software.

To be fair, at least some code has been provided here, unlike another
recently announced piece of software whose author left a trail of
promotion, referencing a Web site which doesn't even run the
advertised software but promises to do so after the "first release":
in other words, vapourware, as far as anyone following up on such
promotion would be concerned. We aren't seeing anything like that
here.

> Thankfully, most people don't expect (let alone "require") readers to
> share their interest or enthusiasm by replying to the ANN. Given your
> past semi-coherent and incoherent posts, expecting people to jump on
> such a thread is a rather tall order.

I think you should give the benefit of the doubt here, particularly
since we've been given a short review of related technologies (so it
isn't as if the ideas are being picked out of thin air), and I think
that such discussion isn't completely unproductive. Things like shared
memory and memory-mapped files are often proposed as optimisations
when building multiprocessing solutions, with solutions like POSH
previously suggested on a frequent basis despite the lack of their
further development, so maybe there is a need for something like this.

Although systems like those developed for Tim Bray's "Wide Finder 2"
exercise [1] probably work best by dumping raw data to disk - in other
words, not channelling data between processes at all - there may well
be a need for better data sharing between processes for some kinds of
concurrent systems. Whether the ideas described here could help, or
whether things like distributed filesystems already cover the same
ground, I think it's still worth having the conversation.

Of course, people shouldn't have to feel obliged to respond with
encouragement to every announcement - there are plenty of projects I
have no direct interest in - but I don't think people should respond
with discouragement if the only basis for it is how they may have
perceived the author's previous contributions to the mailing list or
newsgroup.

Paul

P.S. Maybe those of a more judgemental disposition should peruse the
activities in comp.lang.lisp to preserve a sense of perspective. Upon
my last chance perusal of that newsgroup, I saw frequent mentions of
at least one name familiar to comp.lang.python readers.

[1] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/05/01/Wide-Finder-2