Re: Windows 7 and all my Java stuff.

From:

Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 07:02:36 -0800

Message-ID:

<y7OdnUAfPqcNaJbWnZ2dnUVZ_uydnZ2d@earthlink.com>

Arved Sandstrom wrote:

Nigel Wade wrote:

On Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:14:32 -0800, Roedy Green wrote:

On 23 Nov 2009 13:54:01 GMT, Thomas Pornin <pornin@bolet.org> wrote,
quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :

most of the memory used in a
typical application is for non-pointer data, e.g. byte[] or char[],

In my own code, Strings and arrays of pointers to Strings would be the
most common ram hog.

I wonder if someone could cook up a simple tool to predict the effect of
going to 64 bit on any given app.

Given that going 64bit lifts you out of the 3GB straight-jacket, I
predict the effect of going 64bit would be to free you from worries
about the amount of RAM your application requires and concentrate on
other, more important issues.

Leaving aside the specific numbers, how many times over the past thirty
years (rough timeframe for the Age of PCs [1]) have we said the same
thing? :-)

I spend a lot less time on memory issues now than I did in 1970. I
remember being allowed a couple of weeks for adding a new input record
type to a program. I would do the same task in minutes in my current
Java program.

The main difficulty was that the program was close to no longer fitting
in a 16KB machine. Most of the time went on rearranging overlays and
reusing buffers to make space to add new code and data. Working in
assembly language on punch cards with one machine time slot per day
didn't help, but was less of a problem than the memory.

However, there is a definite tendency for programming to stay hard.
Features get added until programs are almost, but not quite, impossible
to write. It's just the type of hardness that changes. I think
multi-threading to get full performance on many core computers has a lot
of potential.

Patricia