Should size be extended to variables?

[Richard Gaskin]

Mark Waddingham wrote:


 > On 20 Aug 2016, at 18:01, Mark Talluto wrote:
 >>
 >> On Saturday, August 20, 2016, Richard Gaskin wrote:
 >>> Any other options I should consider before submitting a request for
 >>> some means of determining data length in bytes?
 >>
 >> Yes. Arrays.
 >
 > For what purpose?
 >
 > The key thing here is that the number of bytes a value currently
 > takes up in memory is not actually a good measure for how much memory
 > is being used because instances of values can be shared.
 >
 > To put it another way, the memory footprint used by two arrays will
 > not necessarily be the same as the sum of the memory footprint of the
 > two arrays measured separately as they might share the actual memory
 > used by any value in either array. e.g the values used to store the
 > keys in an array are *always* shared.

Would that apply across sub-arrays? e.g., given:

   someKey=
       Name=Mark
       EmpID=2
    anotherKey=
       Name=Kevin
       EmpID=1

...would "Name" and "EmpID" use the same string in memory?


As for byte sizes, my own use case is for establishing pointers to 
locations within a large file on disk.

But as Richmond kindly reminded me, the byte chunk type supports that 
with "the number of bytes of...", so I'm set for now.


 > For optimization purposes the best approach is to measure the amount
 > of memory *actually* in use before and after any particular operation
 > you perform - just as you do with time when profiling for speed
 > (rather than memory footprint).

Is there some built-in way to get the amount of memory in use, or are 
you thinking of shell calls there?

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
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