From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2010-01-18T09:44:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Manipulating big hunks of data

Seebs wrote:
> Is there any kind of container-like-thing in Ruby for the special case
> of a large number of fixed-type-datums?  (As opposed to objects.)
> 
> Basically, imagine that I have, for instance, a huge matrix of data.
> So far as I can tell, that really means a huge selection of individual
> objects, all allocated possibly using separate chunks of memory, because
> they all have to be, well, objects -- they can't just be raw data.  Obviously,
> using any given item in the matrix is convenient if they're all already
> objects, but the storage looks like it'd be ridiculously large.
> 
> Is this just not idiomatic in Ruby?  Is there some base class or object
> type I haven't spotted yet which handles cases like this?

Not sure how closely these fit your requirements, but a couple
seeming possibilities that come to mind are Guy Decoux' mmap
module, and Tokyo Cabinet's array-of-fixed-length-elements database
option:

http://github.com/knu/ruby-mmap

http://1978th.net/tokyocabinet/
http://1978th.net/tokyocabinet/rubydoc/


Hope this helps,

Bill