Regarding hex strings

[monarch_dodra]

On Thursday, 18 October 2012 at 13:15:55 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> monarch_dodra:
>
>> hex! was a very good idea actually, imo.
>
> It must scale up to "real world" usages. Try it with a program
> composed of 3 modules each one containing a 100 KB long string.
> Then try it with a program with two hundred of medium sized
> literals, and let's see compilation times and binary sizes.
>
> Bye,
> bearophile

Hum... The compilation is pretty fast actually, about 1 second, 
provided it doesn't choke.

It works for strings up to a length of 400 lines @ 80 chars per 
line, which result to approximately 16K of data. After that, I 
get a DMD out of memory error.

DMD memory usage spikes quite quickly. To compile those 400 lines 
(16K), I use 800MB of memory (!). If I reach about 1GB, then it 
crashes.

I tried using a refAppender instead of ret~, but that changed 
nothing.

Kind of weird it would use that much memory though...

Also, the memory doesn't get released. I can parse a 1x400 Line 
string, but if I try to parse 3 of them, DMD will choke on the 
second one. :(