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From: hsgj@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Dan Green)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Workbench improvements
Message-ID: <1846@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Date: Tue, 16-Dec-86 22:11:08 EST
Article-I.D.: batcompu.1846
Posted: Tue Dec 16 22:11:08 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 17-Dec-86 23:34:57 EST
Organization: Theory Center, Cornell U., Ithaca NY
Lines: 38
Keywords: dont bother caching

.>                       The "big file of icons" seems like a big win to
.>me if one assumes that it is cached.  Then closing and opening drawers
.>that have once been opened becomes instantaneous.  (Or nearly; you may
.>have to check time of last dir modification.) Amiga needs to support
.>more caching-type ideas.  Memory is cheap and getting cheaper.  I've
.>seen Workbench windows where the whole drawer was in ram:, and those
.>things are FAST (if you can afford that much ram).  But if it's just
.>the icons in ram, you don't use much memory and still get great
.>response on opening the drawers.
.>
.>	Charles Poirier  (USENET)!vax135!cjp

I don't know about the icon cache idea.  On the amiga, where you can
pop out the disk at any time, all caches had better well be write thru.
And for icons, generally the user is going to be doing one of two 
things:  (1) just wants to see the icons long enough to boot ye olde
WordProDeluxeWithTurboSpeedMegaPower, or (2) the user wants to play
around rearranging the display of the icons on the screen.  For case
(1), the cache doesn't pay because all the icons are only referenced
once.  For case (2), you are constantly moving (eg writing data) the
icons, so the "cache" will always be writing thru to disk.
   My "vote" so far is for having one file of icons for each folder.
The huge pain with this method, though, is that it is now very difficult
to create an icon for a new program or file (ie you can't just dup an
existing .info file).  Of course, the speed benefit is nice.
   I think the "ideal" situation would be for the linker to reserve
512 bytes or so as the header for each program, (and fopen'ing a new
file could pad the top with the header also) and then store the .info
in this area.  Of course TYPE would have to be smart enough to skip
the header, which is trivial.  The "small" problem with this is that one
would have to rewrite everything.  I guess its not worth it :-)
   My FINAL EXAM opinion is that I would rather have C/Amiga concentrate
its resources more on bettering Intuition and on making neater hardware,
then on worrying about the silly WorkBench...
-- Dan Green
-- 
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