Re: How to make GNU Guile more successful

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Freja Nordsiek <address@hidden>:

> If I was to hazard a reason for why Guile gets very slow when loading
> 20 GB or more (may or may not be related to it being buggy and
> crashy), my guesses would be a lot of the data when loaded into Guile
> was allocated such that the GC scans it for pointers (using
> scm_gc_malloc instead of scm_gc_malloc_pointerless) which would vastly
> increase the amount of memory the GC needs to scan every time it runs.

Good point!

If you didn't to any C programming, what kind of native Guile data
structures are good for such large random-access storage? At least
arrays haven't specifically been documented for such GC optimization:
<URL: https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Arrays.htm
l#Arrays>.

Maybe bytevectors would do: <URL: https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/m
anual/html_node/Bytevectors.html#Bytevectors>.

Of course constantly encoding to and decoding from a bytevector using
scheme code might be very slow without the help of some binary bulk
formatting facilities for the data records.


Marko