What kind of file is it, if it gets swapped to disk? In that scenario, does "in-composition" virtual data such as virtual data inside of sample and hold patches ever get stored in a way that could be retrievable (not necessarily in any kind of standard QC format)? Could a save of virtual data be forced; can the in memory virtual data be forced into a string type or data type?
When memory is swapped to disk, it's just written as raw pages -- objects can be half in, half out of memory (if the object crosses a page boundary, for example).
If an entire process is written to disk, it's called a "core" file, which is essentially a Mach-O file (or ELF on other Unix-like platforms) -- these usually only happen when an app crashes (and certain ulimits are set), and are handy for debugging, as they contain the exact state of the program when it died. They're also usually very large, and thus seldom used (if your app is using 1.5GB of memory, the core will be a bit over 1.5GB). There are ways to write a process to disk without it crashing (google "gcore"), but those aren't too useful (you can't resurrect a process from a core file that I'm aware of) outside of academic circles or simple curiosity. Swapping a process out doesn't generate core files -- the swapfile(s) aren't really user accessible (they're just huge globs of data that the kernel knows how to read to retrieve stuff that's swapped out, many partial processes in a single file).
Sample & Hold simply holds a pointer to an object (NSString, NSColor, QCImage, NSNumber, QCStructure, etc) -- if that gets swapped to disk, it's just a 32 bit (or 64 bit if you're in 64 bit mode) pointer that doesn't mean anything outside of the process that uses the pointer. If the snow leopard variant is iterator-aware (not sure, haven't checked), it probably stores an array of pointers -- still not too useful outside of the process that's using them.
There are provisions for forcing objects to data types -- usually raw byte streams (NSData) or archives (NSArchiver/NSUnarchiver). This is caller "serialization", and doesn't happen for all types automatically (strings, dates, numbers, byte data, and arrays and dictionaries full of just strings, dates, numbers, and byte data all serialize out of the box), but if your objects obey the NSCoding protocol they can archive/unarchive (serialize/unserialize) as well.
This sort of stuff is all way beyond the scope of what QC can do out of the box (or even with some severely perverse plugins! ;) -- did you have a particular use in mind for this kind of thing?
-- [ christopher wright ] [email protected] http://kineme.net/
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