On Tue, 05 Mar 2013 03:22:00 -0500, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisp...@gmx.com>
wrote:
On Tuesday, March 05, 2013 09:14:16 BLM768 wrote:
While working on a project, I've started to realize that I miss
streams. If someone's not already working on bringing std.stream
up to snuff, I think that we should start thinking about to do
that.
Of course, with ranges being so popular (with very good reason),
the new stream interface would probably just be a range wrapper
around a file; in fact, a decent amount of functionality could be
implemented by just adding a byChars range to the standard File
struct and leaving the parsing functionality to std.conv.parse.
Of course, there's no reason to stop there; we could also add
socket streams, compressed streams, and just about any other type
of stream, all without an especially large amount of effort.
Unless someone already wants to tackle the project (or has
already started), I'd be willing to work out at least a basic
design and implementation.
In general, a stream _is_ a range, making a lot of "stream" stuff
basically
irrelevant. What's needed then is a solid, efficient range interface on
top of
I/O (which we're lacking at the moment).
This is not correct. A stream is a good low-level representation of i/o.
A range is a good high-level abstraction of that i/o. We need both.
Ranges make terrible streams for two reasons:
1. r.front does not have room for 'read n bytes'. Making it do that is
awkward (e.g. r.nextRead = 20; r.front; // read 20 bytes)
2. ranges have separate operations for getting data and progressing data.
Streams by their very nature combine the two in one operation (i.e. read)
Now, ranges ARE a very good interface for a high level abstraction. But
we need a good low-level type to perform the buffering necessary to make
ranges functional. std.io is a design that hopefully will fit within the
existing File type, be compatible with C's printf, and also provides a
replacement for C's antiquated FILE * buffering stream. With tests I have
done, std.io is more efficient and more flexible/powerful than C's version.
Steven Schveighoffer was working on std.io (which would be a replacement
for
std.stdio), and I believe that streams were supposed to be part of that,
but
I'm not sure. And I don't know quite what std.io's status is at this
point, so
I have no idea when it'll be ready for review. Steven seems to be very
busy
these days, so I suspect that it's been a while since much progress was
made
on it.
Yes, very busy :) I had taken a break from D for about 3-4 months, had to
work on my side business. Still working like mad there, but I'm carving
out as much time as I can for D.
std.io has not had pretty much any progress since I last went through the
ringer (and how!) on the forums. It is not dead, but it will take me some
time to be able to kick start it again (read: understand what the hell I
was doing there). I do plan to try in the coming months.
-Steve
