ColdStore is a gigabyte-scale persistent object store which provides:

  • Extent-based allocation (for maximal spatial locality of reference, minimal working set)
  • Interning of Elf symbols (so your class implementation may change without the necessity to rebuild the store.)
  • A rich set of Container and Basic classes optimised with respect to the QVMM allocator.
  • A toy language - Chaos, designed to provide low-level access to objects and regression testing of the store and its application classes.
  • A C++ like language - Freon, which has some extremely novel interpretation techniques (no stack, no bytecode, we just manipulate the parse tree.)

Audience

This system is likely to be of use to you if you're looking for a way to store heterogenous data, access and process it quickly, and you're a programmer. While it's possible to present this kind of facility to an end user, it's unlikely to make much difference to them: after all, that's what users expect of everything anyway. This system is designed to help programmers deliver it with most convenience (to the programmers, of course :)

Possible Uses

We're planning to use it to make large network-capable interoperable scripting-language workspaces restartable (possibly migrateable).

You might use it as:

  • A replacement for a database: there's a Dict class which provides BTree indexing.
  • A cache for highly structured objects (eg. decoded Web pages)
  • A back end for any program which generates large quantities of heterogenous data which needs to stick around for a long time.

Whitepaper

We've got a Whitepaper. It goes into some detail as to design, but it's sadly out of date.

Detail
The nitty-gritty: an explanation of ColdStore's design, what it does, and what it might be used for.

Rationale
Why ColdStore? An explanation of what we're up to.

Future Plans
Get it, compile it, run it, tweak it. Lather, rinse, repeat: all with the fresh smell of GNU.

Future Plans
We think that ColdStore has potential. Here's what's in the offing: from the nearly feasible to the bright blue sky. You can probably help us out here.

Links
Though it sometimes feels that way, we're not the only ones thinking about these things. A few references to articles on object persistence and all that gubbins.

Contacts
Praise the visionaries behind this thing; alternatively, berate the guilty parties.

Credits
That Oscar acceptance speech in full.