Permalink
Reply
On Thursday, 18 May 2023 at 01:31:21 UTC, Jacob Shtokolov wrote:
>- Have you looked at the IOPipe library?
Yeah, I talked with schveiguy on the discord server for a bit; it honestly looks like a better concept than what I'm doing, lol. But I didn't notice it until yesterday. So maybe I should focus my efforts there? I don't know yet.
>- What are the main benefits over the existing Ranges concept? Say, given your example:
import streams;
void readFileTo(S)(string filename, S stream) if (isOutputStream!(S, ubyte)) {
import std.stdio;
auto fIn = FileInputStream(filename);
transferTo(fIn, stream);
}
With ranges, this would look something like:
import std;
void readFileTo(S)(string filename, ref S stream) if (isOutputRange!(S, ubyte[])) {
File(filename).byChunk().copy(stream);
}
Which is more or less the same.
I would say that there isn't really a big benefit over using ranges in terms of how they're expressed, but more that I think (and I may be wrong) that streams are a simpler, easier concept for programmers to grasp, especially those that are migrating to D from some other language that uses a similar stream concept.
Another benefit is that, as pointed out by Guillame Pilot in another thread, phobos ranges (and most of phobos for that matter) has no real convention for naming schemes, and they generally don't try to be betterC-compatible, so it makes it difficult to use them in any low-level code.
Finally, my streams allow the code to handle errors more gracefully without needing exceptions, which isn't always convenient to do with ranges.
But you're right; to the average D programmer, streams are just a different flavor of accomplishing the same thing.
>- In the README you write:
Phobos' concept of an Input Range relies on implicit buffering of results... This doesn't map as easily to many low-level resources
AFAIK, the read/write buffers are anywhere, except, probably, sendfile() and some combination of mmap and write. But I'm struggling to get how this streams concept maps onto sendfile as well.
Yeah, I suppose what I was trying to say, is that this library puts the programmer in more control of if and when buffers are allocated and used with IO. But of course for sendfile there's no need for streams.
