Borland International Inc manages to run its new Quattro Pro spreadsheet on memory-limited personal computers by virtue of its Virtual Real-time Object-Oriented Memory Manager, but what exactly is VROOMM and how does it work? Microbytes Daily explains that the system is similar to the overlays used in many large programs, and avoids the Out of Memory error messages that are becoming the bane of personal computing now that no-one can write a program economically: the Borland virtual memory system is based on small, variable-size program segments that it calls objects since they can call each other – but VROOMM objects are modules of binary rather than source code and do not, at least at present, offer inheritance and accessibility by outside programmers; most VROOMM objects are only 2Kb or 4Kb in size so that the program can load into memory only those parts that will most probably be used, and if it guesses wrong, new objects will load from disk quickly – and Borland says that it will someday make the VROOMM technology available as a programming tool to outsiders.
