Re: [MacPerl] buffer size?

[online@mactech.com (Jeff at MacTech)]

In article <mac-perl.199811111211.GAA29759@arthur.avalon.net>, Brad Hanson
<bradh@pobox.com> wrote:

>On 11/10/98 at 9:36 AM, irons@espresso.hampshire.edu (Nathaniel Irons)
>wrote:
>
>> On 11/10/98 at 8:51 AM, pudge@pobox.com (Chris Nandor) wrote:
>> 
>> > Yes.  The limitations are to the MacPerl windows only.  Output
>> > to a file is unlimited, and output to an external editor may
>> > be limited by Apple Event limitations (whatever they may be).
>> 
>> BBEdit crashes on receipt of more than about 450K of data at a time
>> (using Brad's fantastic BBEdit plug-ins).
>
>The 450K limit on the amount of data returned to BBEdit from MacPerl can
>be increased by increasing the memory allocation of BBEdit. I've done
>tests where over 2 MB was returned to a BBEdit window from MacPerl.
>
>It is certainly a bad thing that BBEdit crashes (or sometimes quits with
>an out of memory alert) when the amount of text returned by MacPerl is too
>large, but I have not found a way to deal with this in the plug-ins. I
>think fixing this problem would require the attention of Bare Bones
>Software.

I could be dead wrong here, but I think the problem may stem from the way
AppleEvents functions. I believe that the AE Manager puts the response
into the calling application's heap (in this case BBEdit) before the reply
message is sent to the app, so that it doesn't have a chance to handle
situations where the response is huge, because by the time it could check
the size it is too late. But I'm not 100% sure of this. (But it's
something I was thinking about recently.)
-- 
__________________________________________________________________________

Jeff Clites                Online Editor           http://www.MacTech.com/
online@MacTech.com         MacTech Magazine
__________________________________________________________________________

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