RE: Teraflops consumer chips by 2006

From: Ben Goertzel (ben@webmind.com)
Date: Tue Mar 13 2001 - 05:40:12 MST


> Ben: Have you thought about compressing your data before paging to/from
> disk? And why use Java anyway? Nice language to work with, but it blows
> goats in the memory use department... :)

Of course, we do compress data before paging to and from disk

In RAM, of course, the data representation is pretty far from compressed,
since a highly
expanded representation is needed for effective cognition

You're right about Java, it wastes way too much memory. When I started with
it in 1997, I
assumed they would have fixed this problem by now -- as they have fixed the
speed problem convincingly
(with tools like Hotspot and Jove).

By adopting an appropriate design pattern, however, one can minimize the
memory bloat. Basically, you
should store most data in arrays, and make nice elegant OO wrappers for the
arrays.

I'm not sure I would choose Java again were I to start over. But still, C
is so nasty to debug and so slow
to develop in, and none of the really ~nice~ languages are scalable...

ben



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:36 MDT