stdio and Tango I/O performance

[Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email)]

Over the past couple of weeks Walter and I have worked on improving the 
stdio module, following my shocking discovery that its performance was 
inadequate for any amount of serious coding. To say nothing about the 
lack of the input routines readf, readln, etc.

The good news is that Walter and myself have improved stdio's reading 
performance by an order of magnitude when compared to a naive 
implementation using fgetc(). Now reading is almost as fast as C would 
allow you, beats Perl and C++, (Perl is harder to beat than C++), while 
writef* is still suboptimal (but write without "f" is fast because it 
forwards to the C routine).

I was actually surprised that nobody seems to have discovered the 
abysmal performance of the writef family. If they did, they would have 
likely posted reports on this newsgroup.

This ate a lot of time measuring, testing, and optimizing. So I have a 
question - has anyone verified that Tango's I/O performance is up to 
snuff? I see it imposes the dynamic-polymorphic approach, and unless 
there was some serious performance work going on, it's possible it's 
even slower than stdio.


Thanks,

Andrei