Re: Array and memory usage

[mheaney@on2.com (Matthew Heaney)]

Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com> wrote in message news:<wccr89ge7hw.fsf@shell01.TheWorld.com>...
> 
> If you use this trick on Windows, it will allocate backing store for all
> that virtual memory.  I believe most Unix systems are smarter than that.
> 
> This trick is sometimes more efficient than linked lists for growable
> data structures.  The links waste space, plus if you're not careful, the
> list gets scattered all over the place, damaging cache behavior.  The
> nice thing about arrays is that they are contiguous.

One thing you can on Windows is simply reserve the virtual memory for
the array, without committing it to physical memory, and then use SEH
("structured exception handling") to handle the error.

The SEH mechanism supports resumption semantics, so you can handle the
exception by committing the page you need, and then resuming from the
spot from where the exception was raised.

This is documented in Jeff Richter's Programming Applications book.