On Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:08:53 -0500, Bane
<[email protected]> wrote:
I have been playing with std.process (D2) lately, and have 2 suggestions
and more or less tested code if somebody other than my self have use for
it.
One is shell() function (not mentioned in the docs, curious), I see it
can be made more efficient on Windows. It executes shell command and
returns standard output as string. Current implementation do it by
piping stdout to temporary file on disk and reading that file back.
Using CreateProccess Windows API it can do same job 3 times faster and
remove need for temporary files and disk writes. I think that is
beneficial gain for some applications.
Other is fork-exec implementation eg. starting a program using command
line and detaching it from parent, so it continues to run after parent
is dead. On Posix it is implemented using fork() and exec() calls, on
Windows using CreateProcess.
There is a completely revamped version of std.process. It is being held
up right now because DMD on windows depends on DMC for it's C runtime, and
DMC has issues supporting pipes. I have recently opened a pull request
for Walter to merge, I'm going to ping him about it right after 2.057 is
released.
For more info, see the docs Lars posted here:
http://kyllingen.net/code/ltk/doc/process.html
Once the DMC issue is fixed, you should see this improvement getting much
more attention. It's very low hanging fruit.
-Steve
