JuliaLang/julia — pull request #743 by timholy (2012-04-20 09:39:37+00:00)
Title: RFC: steps towards memory-mapped arrays

I'm interested in supporting memory-mapped arrays. While I am hoping this won't be hard, it does touch some core parts of Julia, so I thought I'd seek feedback at an early stage. The attached implementation is _incomplete_, but it does illustrate how I'm hoping to proceed. In addition to the overall design, I have 4 questions embedded in the constructor. The fourth is the make-or-break question, the rest are relatively minor.

I was not planning to implement "all of array functionality" on top of MmapArray; I don't personally see the sense of making it easy to do (misguided?) stuff like this:

ma += 1

Anyone who wants to do that can write ma.a += 1, of course. The slightly more laborious syntax might help them think about what they're doing.