reddit discussion on replacing Python in 0install

[Walter Bright]

On 6/13/2013 6:24 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> If this was such a big deal, then FILE * would guarantee the alignment went
> back.  It's not that hard.

I know it isn't hard. But D's charter is not to go and patch the C runtime 
library, nor is that remotely practical across all the thousands of C 
implementations out there.


> And I have experience with turning them off -- some of my clients requested that
> to avoid losing data that was in the write cache.  It does not all of a sudden
> slow down the performance of the drive.

I ran some experiments a while back writing to a slow SD card. There was a big 
difference in speed when turning write caching on and off. I bet you'll see 
quite a whopper of a difference if you try that with a floppy drive!

In other words, the difference shows up when you've got a fairly slow device. 
Write caching would not have been invented if it had no effect.


> But this whole discussion is academic at this point, Jérôme identified that we
> can simply check to see if the file descriptor is valid, without flushing.

His fix is insufficient for other reasons as already pointed out.


> This isn't the problem that was presented.  The problem that was presented is
> that given an invalid file descriptor, writeln happily works (as long as you
> don't cause a flush) and does not throw.  This is unintuitive to someone who is
> expecting writeln to choke on an invalid descriptor.

That behavior is normal to anyone used to working with C stdio.

What is wrong and needs fixing is the program exiting with "success" indication 
when the output has actually failed.