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> One example that comes to mind was that spreadsheets are just memory mapped files and the layout of the file on disk is identical to the data structures in me
by blattimwind 7y ago
> One example that comes to mind was that spreadsheets are just memory mapped files and the layout of the file on disk is identical to the data structures in memory. This allows them eschew translation to a data interchange format. So they got performance at the cost of interoperability, which is probably what's hampering open office & friends.
That improves save/restore performance, but in and of itself doesn't do much about execution performance of macros.
- dclusin 7y agoIt would help program runtime as well because the macro could be operating on data not loaded in memory. Not having to marshal and un-marshal data can save lots of execution time, especially in the face of non-contiguous reads/writes. Databases store information using B-Tree's for example so that they can calculate the offset of the data and jump directly to it. It would probably take a lot of gymnastics to get this from an XML or JSON file interchange format. I'm sure they could probably come up with something that is both portable and performant but it's probably not a big priority at Microsoft.