3 ms·
When Knuth was writing TeX, computer systems had really small memories - I'm sure it strongly affected TeX's architecture, because TeX reads the source document
by yongjik 6y ago
When Knuth was writing TeX, computer systems had really small memories - I'm sure it strongly affected TeX's architecture, because TeX reads the source document and generates output pages one by one, like some kind of online streaming processor. It never holds the entire document in memory, because old computers couldn't do it.
- pantaloony 6y agoSeems reasonable to me. One of the first things I’d reach for if I wanted to build a flexible tool that’d perform well, last, and be broadly useful is the ability to chop up the workload, ideally into a fixed size, but into some practically-by-convention-probably-not-too-big size as a (riskier) fallback if fixed size wasn’t practical. IME any time you need performance & stability with unknown input, it’s gonna end up looking like streaming.