On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 8:11 PM, Keith Mason <[email protected]> wrote:
> Got it, thanks. In these terms, I guess I wish that there was an option > for mutable composite types to be stored inline rather than heap allocated. > That's often called a (mutable) value type. E.g. C# distinguishes reference types – objects that are passed and assigned by reference/sharing – from value types, which are like C structs and are passed and assigned by copying. (If you think of reference types as pointers to objects, you're basically right). Rather than introducing two radically semantically different kinds of types, we opted for mutable versus immutable which have the same semantics except for the obvious difference that you can't mutate an immutable value. This distinction is much simpler to understand and nice for lots of things, but it is occasionally limiting. Anyway, this has been helpful, if only to confirm that there isn't a great > way to do what I want. I need to rethink the problem space. > Have you considered column-oriented storage where each column is homogenous and can be mmapped?
