From: Clifford Heath <cjh_nospam@...>
Date: 2002-06-21T15:48:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Why is I/O slow?

Austin Ziegler wrote:
> Why not? It is, after all, dependent upon the presence of a
> particular glibc -- which I won't have, since I do most of my Ruby
> on Windows.

I certainly didn't mean to start a Linux/Windows war - I make a living
selling apps for Windows (which I develop as much on Linux as I can).

The absolute requirement for portability of Ruby applications is
unquestioned. That doesn't mean that Ruby, internally, must use
the same APIs everywhere. On Windows, that means it *should* use
OpenFileW and friends (not stdio), on Linux, glibc, and I could care
less what it uses elsewhere, as long as it's the fastest possible
consistent with identical behaviour across platforms. I've been
writing cross-platform applications since 1981, and built a 100+
employee company by selling a cross-platform GUI tool of my own
design with a full-blown OO compiler/interpreter, all up nearly a
million lines non-commented of C++ code, and although that isn't
what we do now, I think I know what I'm talking about.

I'm not crowing BTW; Ruby has given me more pure programming joy than
anything else in the last decade, and in twenty years it's the only
software tool I wish I'd created myself! All praise to Matz!

But if anyone tells me I should put up with I/O that's FIFTEEN TO
THIRTY TIMES slower than necessary so that they don't have #ifdefs
in the source code of their interpreter, I will very rapidly tell
them where to get off. I'm sure that wasn't what people seriously
thought though...

--
Clifford Heath