A very interesting idea - and potentially very useful. I'm not sure "out of core" is a great name - since we haven't used core memory in 25 years as far as I know.
create/open/read/write/close file. I would have been using std::fstream as a portable file access method, but it lacks support of files larger than 2 GB. It is really big disadvantage in my case.
I faced this problem some time ago. The problem is was the file sizes over 2GB were supported by the standard fopen, etc on windows. I don't rememeber how I dealt with unix. I endup making an reimplementing of fopen, fseek in terms of windows API. (wfopen? - I don't rememeber). At the same time I also implemented wrappers for posix async i/o around the very unwieldy windows async API. I have no idea if this information is useful Robert Ramey