[Cuis-dev] Porting State of Magma

Luciano Notarfrancesco luchiano at gmail.com
Tue Jun 8 01:11:24 PDT 2021


On Mon, 7 Jun 2021 at 10:57 PM Juan Vuletich via Cuis-dev <
cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st> wrote:

>
> Not having used ImageSegments in decades, I still believe that making
> them work in Cuis is entirely possible, and not too much work.
>
> But I'm not sure if that would, for example, suit your needs. It was a
> good solution to give users comfortable access to content that was much
> larger than available RAM. In these days, I don't see much need for that
> use case. And it doesn't offer most of what a database offers. In many
> cases, SmartRefStream is a good substitute.


I haven’t used image segments in many years too, and I don’t think I’ll
 need them for anything in the foreseeable future. In the past I used them
twice, as far as I can remember. The first time it was to store diphones
(pairs of phonemes) for a text to speech system that was much better than
the one that ended up in the Squeak image, but had the disadvantage of
depending on this database of diphones. The second time it was for storing
maps and satellite images downloaded from some openly available servers at
the time (before keyhole, google maps and all that). In both cases loading
speed was important, specially in the TTS system in order to get response
times close to real-time, and image segments were perfect for that because
they just loaded a piece of object memory without running any Smalltalk
code, super fast. I used them in combination with weak references and
finalization, I think, in order to offload stuff automatically if memory
was getting tight.

It might be worth keeping them also because of their beauty. I always found
the idea very elegant, not just a hack.

>
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