OpenEuphoria

internal storage

• Posted by Jim Hendricks <jim at bizcomputinginc.com> Sep 19, 2004
• 437 views

The manual states:

 Performance Note:
    Does this mean that all atoms are stored in memory as 8-byte 
    floating-point numbers? No. The Euphoria interpreter usually 
    stores integer-valued atoms as machine integers (4 bytes) to 
    save space and improve execution speed. When fractional results 
    occur or numbers get too big, conversion to floating-point happens 
    automatically.

My question is are string sequences then stored as 4 byte atoms or as 
1 byte atoms?

This is quite important to the app I am porting since I am parsing about
4 Meg of character data and the process performs much better if I can
parse the character data to an intermediate state in memory which causes
having all the data in memory at once. I could always go with an
intermediate state to temp files, but this causes the process to run 1000%
slower( on windoze ). I can live with requiring 4 Meg of memory consumption
for this process, but not so keen on requiring 16 Meg of memory consumption.

Jim