[prev] [thread] [next] [lurker] [Date index for 2003/09/02]
On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 04:31:18PM +0100, Mark Fowler wrote: > Of course, it was more powerful than that. You could drag documents to > other applications and it would 'save' them into the application directly. > But that's just crazy talk. Next thing people will be having shells that > can pipe output from one program to the next. Indeed. And given that we get told of for liking things, I'm going to have to say what I hate about that. I don't hate it when it uses a temporary file for this save (although obviously I prefer it when the two applications in question understand the full protocol and do the transfer entirely in RAM) I hate the implementation because it did a temporary copy into the RMA (Relocatable Module Area), rather than copying the data direct from one task to the other. The RISC OS memory map limits the size of the RMA (to 16 Meg IIRC on 3.5+) And if you start shifting a large file back and forth the RMA slowly gets fragmented to the point whereby there isn't a block large enough for your file to fit in. So, even though the free space bar says there is 10 times the amount needed, there's not enough in once block, and an allocation attempt fails. At which point the RAM transfer fails. And the bit that I hates - at this point the whole inter-application save fails, rather than falling back to a temporary file. So either one has to resort to saving to disk by hand, or reboot the machine. Grr. The other thing that I hates is that all this was working very nicely about 15 years ago. And most every other OS has failed to steal the nice bits. Nicholas Clark
Generated at 14:02 on 01 Jul 2004 by mariachi 0.52