[dahart]

This! Command line programs have no excuse, they should never need to decompress the entire file to memory. GUI image editors and web browsers probably generally do need to, but there definitely are such options for dealing with more pixels than you can display.

Anyway, do you know some of these "better" graphics programs that actually behave this way, especially command line processing? I am interested in finding more of them.

EDIT: Okay, I have to add & admit that by "no excuse", I actually mean somewhat the opposite. ;) I mean that its possible to do streaming image processing on compressed formats, not that its trivial to do or as easy as decompressing the file in a single call. I just wish that programs would handle very large images more, and it sucks when they don't even though I know its possible. Especially programs intended for dealing with large images like Hugin. Now, I know its a PITA to tile & stream compressed formats because I've done it, but I'm sure I've written image I/O that decompresses the entire file to RAM 100x more frequently than anything that tiles and/or streams, because I've only handled tiling or streaming myself once, and it was harder. :P

[VikingCoder]

Virtual memory management saves your butt, almost all the time.

It's ridiculous when the compression ratios are so absurd, like in this case.