[phobos] escaping FILE's buffering tyranny

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 9/29/10 17:45 PDT, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Wednesday, September 29, 2010 17:36:34 s50 wrote:
>> Oops, you already have mentioned about the lookahead things.
>> Sorry I overlooked it.
>
> Did you look too far ahead? ;)
>
> It's interesting to hear about Ruby's situation with c stdio though.

I don't know about Ruby, but my experience with C++ and Perl suggests 
that there are always some dark corners in any language's file I/O, 
inevitably revolving around buffering and interaction with C. My 
speculation is that all languages must implement their stuff on top of 
C's stdio, which has an inadequate API. My big question is how come 
stdio has evolved so little and so slowly; the file API is central to 
Unix. But then all programs that do serious I/O go away from FILE* and 
use ioctl() et al.


Andrei