[Bioperl-l] Hilmar and Ewan debate SeqFeatures some more...

[Ewan Birney]

On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, Hilmar Lapp wrote:

Hilmar. I agree with all your statements basically, but I'm still sticking
to my claims. I think we need to hear more feedback - I'd be really
interested in david's call on the defaultness of ->start not throwing an
exception.

We then might need to call in the supreme court here...

> Thomas Down wrote:
> > 
> > Actually, my understanding is that the per-object overhead in
> > perl is pretty high, especially for objects implemented as
> > hashes.  If you ever want to hold millions of SeqFeatures in
> > memory (a not unreasonable requirement, I'd suggest), a few
> > hundred bytes per location might come back with a vengence.
> 
> Hmm. I guess I can't make a sensible comment on this. Anyone else out
> there who has experienced a performance drawback imposed by Perl's
> object handling (well, I know in fact it's not objects Perl handles
> ...)?

Oh yes ;)

Ensembl can trivially generate > 10,000 features in a modest sized
query. To get this to happen in any sensible way we have a packed C
struct. I would be against inisiting on two objects have to be present.

Of course having $seqfeature->location return $self for these cases could
really solve it. Therefore this is not a show-stopper for Ensembl, but be
aware that if we made this the default for Bioperl we would be doubling
our memory for feature-heavy queries, and I suspect suffering for it.

> 
> If this problem is real, any chances this will be mitigated in
> upcoming Perl releases (5.6? 6.0?)? In general I hate having to adapt
> an object model to the limitations of a language ... :(
> 
> > 
> > Of course, this can probably be mitigated by implementing the
> > locations as C structs.  Is this approach currently being
> > used in BioPerl?
> > 
> 
> Well, given the users on Win32 and Mac this is probably not an option
> for any module that is somewhat part of the core.
> 
> 	Hilmar
> -- 
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> Hilmar Lapp                            email: lapp@gnf.org
> GNF, San Diego, Ca. 92121              phone: +1-858-812-1757
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> 

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