reddit discussion on replacing Python in 0install

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 6/12/13 11:18 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Jun 2013 02:48:44 -0400, Walter Bright
> <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
>
>> On 6/11/2013 10:15 PM, deadalnix wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, 12 June 2013 at 04:23:39 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>>> I don't agree. Buffering is often done on page size boundaries -
>>>> throwing out
>>>> a random number of characters and then flushing will get it all wonky.
>>>
>>> You clearly missed something in the discussion here. The proposal is
>>> to flush
>>> once at first use, so an Exception is thrown. Nothing change after
>>> that first
>>> flush at initialization, other flushes stay where they are.
>>
>> Not at all. A flush forces a write to the disk - that's the point of
>> it. Disks are not at all well tuned to writing a few bytes, they like
>> to be written in aligned blocks of block sizes, and the I/O subsystem
>> is designed for that.
>>
>> This is why stdout has a flag in it saying if it is a "block oriented"
>> or "character oriented" device. It makes a big difference. This
>> proposal attempts to treat a block device like a character device. It
>> will work, but it will perform poorly.
>
> No, it does perform well. You are still not understanding the proposal.

I agree performance is not a problem. But it's just weird behavior. We 
should flush stdout termination, anything else would have to be 
carefully justified - and this is not.

Andrei