Re: [9fans] Making read(1) an rc(1) builtin?

[roger peppe <rogpeppe@gmail.com>]

On 6 April 2011 17:32, Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 05 Apr 2011 15:53:43 MDT andrey mirtchovski <mirtchovski@gmail.com>  wrote:
>> so, an optimized /sys/src/cmd/read.c that doesn't read char-by-char
>> should give us an improvement, right? right:
>> 9grid% newaread
>> 1.52u 22.56s 15.66r    newaread
>>
>> and that's just for the silly "test" string. the improvement would be
>> bigger for longer strings.
>
> read(1) is allowed to read one line and no more. Given a read
> of > 1 char, a console device will return a line at most but
> other devices can return more than one line, thereby
> preventing the next guy from reading it.  read(1) has to read
> one char at a time.
>
> With a builtin read you don't pay the cost of a fork/exec per
> char.  And it would be less clunky -- instead of "foo=`{read}"
> you can say "read foo".  It is not like rc going to get fat by
> adding read; it already has to read!

a builtin read would still have to read one character at a time though.