From: Dan Sugalski <dan@...>
Date: 2003-04-04T03:54:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Newbie question:read file speed

At 1:04 AM +0900 4/4/03, Daniel Berger wrote:
>Dan Sugalski wrote:
>>
><snip>
>>  Be aware that perl cheats unmercifully at IO, to the extent of
>>  peeking beneath the C IO library hood and acting directly on the
>>  underlying buffer structure. While somewhat evil (okay, it's very
>>  evil) it does cut out at least one level of function calls for IO,
>>  and speeds things up some.
>>  --
>>                                           Dan
>
>This must be the vaunted Perl IO layer that I've seen mentioned from
>time to time.

Nope. That's more a Tcl/SysV style streams thing, and is relatively 
new. This is old code, and has been in perl for years.

>  Any reason Ruby couldn't "cheat" as well?  Anything Ruby
>can borrow here?

Sure, license willing. (And I'm pretty sure it is, but I'd 
double-check with Larry and Matz first) The code's in sv.c, in the 
Perl_sv_gets function, though there's a fair amount of gook and macro 
expansion you may have to do to actually make sense of it. The code's 
in there, though. Evil, definitely evil, but it is there.
-- 
                                         Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                       teddy bears get drunk