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Comment by devit

3 days ago

"Handling texts that are larger than available memory. Ropey is an in-memory data structure."

That seems to make it of dubious use, not really suitable for a well-engineered text editor.

The fact that it's UTF-8 only is also a serious problem since files can contain arbitrary byte sequences.

What kind of wild use case involves editing a text file larger than modern ram?

I disagree that there are a lot of editors that can handle files not in RAM. But I'd like one. All I know of is 'less'.

What text editor do you use where loading a large text file doesn't put that entire text file in memory? In a world where even sub-$100 devices have gigabytes of memory, this doesn't seem even remotely problematic.

  • those gigabytes of memory on sub-$100 devices are usually occupied by other apps taking the same careless approach to memory, so it's very problematic

    • Devices with lots of ram can fit huge files, devices with very little ram can still fit very large, but not gigabytes-huge files. You're not going to fire up VS Code on pi 2 and load a 5GB log file, but you are going to fire up a simpler editor and open a 100MB log file. So as long as you can fit files that make sense for your device in memory, so why would "it loads files into memory" be a problem?

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