Hi Igor,
I am happy to see you getting active again. The next step is to commit code at the rate you reply emails. I���d be even happier :).
To address your point, of course it certainly would be great to have more people work on automated support for swapping data in and out of the image. That was the original idea behind the Fuel work. I have seen a couple of cases on the mailing lists where people are actually using Fuel for caching purposes. I have done this a couple of times, too. But, at this point these are dedicated solutions and would be interesting to see it expand further.
However, your assumption is that the best design is one that deals with small chunks of data at a time. This made a lot of sense when memory was expensive and small. But, these days the cost is going down very rapidly, and sizes of 128+ GB of RAM is nowadays quite cheap, and there are strong signs of super large non-volatile memories become increasingly accessible. The software design should take advantage of what hardware offers, so it is not unreasonable to want to have a GC that can deal with large size.
We should always challenge the assumptions behind our designs, because the world keeps changing and we risk becoming irrelevant, a syndrome that is not foreign to Smalltalk aficionados.
Cheers,
Doru
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"Not knowing how to do something is not an argument for how it cannot be done."