Re: Anti-bloat side project

[Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 03:16:10PM +0200, Moritz Wilhelmy wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 09:06:43 -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> > Is it possibly implemented as a shell script? The way the shell "read"
> > command works, it's required to perform byte-at-a-time reads like
> > this. Otherwise, I'm guessing someone just foolishly turned off
> > buffering on the FILE...
> 
> In fact, it really is a C program, and sadly, it seems they really
> implement it that way (by greping over the code for about 30 seconds);
> 
> See src/mygetline.c on hg tip[1]:
>  41         while(1) {
>  42                 res = read(fd, &ch, 1);
> 
> Maybe coders need to be educated about how not to write code in order to
> avoid (syscall-)bloat?
> 
> [1]: http://mlmmj.org/hg/mlmmj/file/tip/src/mygetline.c

As they're using a file descriptor rather than a FILE or their own
higher-level buffering structure, the design forces them to either
require that the file descriptor be seekable (so they can seek back
after reading too much) or read one byte at a time.

I'm not sure why someone would use file descriptors rather than stdio
or something similar for processing text.. Looks lke just a bad
design. There's no immediate fix, however, as the issue is a result of
the design.

Rich