--- Thomas Fletcher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sat, 23 Jun 2001, Martin Sevior wrote:
> >
> > This is an interesting debate. One extra point we
> should all keep in mind
> > is that we probabally don't waste much more space
> going from 16 => 32 bits
> > for character representation.
>
> [Other comments about sizes of data structures
> snipped]
>
> Martin,
>
> Call me crazy ... but I _totally_ don't believe
> this statement. For
> anyone working on documents of any size, our memory
> consumption is an
> issue. Deciding to double the per character memory
> requirements will
> add up. While some systems are swappable ... we
> certainly don't want
> to count out the fact that Abi could be used on
> smaller devices.
while I agree that we should try to remain as little
as possible, I agree with Martin.
Suppose a document of 66 chars per line, 30 lines per
page, 100 pages. If the doc contains no images (only
lines and lines of chars), we have:
66 * 30 * 100 = 198000 chars
If we use UCS-2, we will need ~400K to store only the
text. If we use UCS-4, we will need ~800K
Last time I took a look at files so big (with the test
that I executed with the perl bindings), gtop was
saying me that AbiWord was using 10M of memory (and I
think that the file was not 100 pages long, it was ~50
pages long, I think).
So we're using only ~5% of space to save the text (if
we use UCS-4 we will need 10%). So IMO we can switch
to UCS-4 without caring about memory consumation (at
least at the first time).
Of course, if somebody cares enough to change for the
simplistic "only UCS-4" aproach to a more complex
approach such Mike's one that saves memory &/| speed,
I will be more than happy, but it seems to me that
this time will be best spended fixing the remaining
90% of memory.
Cheers,
--
Joaquin Cuenca Abela
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail
http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/
