ksh93/stdio/sfio etc./ was: Re: [ksh93-integration-discuss] comments on rev 287 makefiles

[Roland Mainz]

Glenn Fowler wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Jun 2006 13:14:29 -0400 James Carlson wrote:
> > Felix Schulte writes:
> > > On 6/25/06, Casper.Dik at sun.com <Casper.Dik at sun.com> wrote:
> > > > This seems wrong; personally I think we should rip out any replacement
> > > > for system libraries; such duplication leads to more code which needs
> > > > to be maintained.  This includes replacements for <stdio.h>.
> > > There would be no need to replace it if the stdio implementation in
> > > Solaris would be sane, however since it sucks a faster, non-sucking
> > > replacement would be cool.
> 
> > In that case, the right answer is to remove the "sucking" part of the
> > Solaris stdio.  Since stdio is part of Open Solaris, this is doable.
> 
> I'm not sure what the issue is here
> 
> fixing/improving any part of any stdio implementation is non-trivial
> isn't that what ``remove the "sucking" part of the Solaris stdio'' would entail?

The question is what actually "sucks" in Solaris stdio...

> balking about two separate stdio implementations is understandable
> but the ast stdio implementation is a side effect of the fact that
> ksh + the ast libraries use the ast sfio for io (not stdio)
> ast simply provides a stdio wrapper on top of sfio so that non-ast
> code compiled/linked against it can benefit from its performance/features
> (e.g., sfio disciplines can be pushed on ast stdio streams)
> 
> the stdio wrapper could be removed

Please don't do that (otherwise we could demand the same from
Mozilla.org, Apache.org, mysql, Gnome.org and a couple of other project
Sun includes in Solaris...).
I think the whole mess started because people didn't understand the
background and I hope I've written now enougth emails about that
(actually the size of the emails exchanged about this topic now exceeds
the size of the stdio wrappers in libast... ;-( ).

> but that might affect external ast ksh builtin implementations that
> use stdio (they may chose to use the more familiar stdio, knowing
> that the ksh/ast/libcmd sfio hooks/performance will still work)

Yes... and I vote against the removal of the stdio wrapper in libast
since it is at least a stdio-like implementation which works uniformly
across several OS versions+implementations and easily allows users to
use the underlying sfio and it's advantages...

----

Bye,
Roland

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