Re: Run-time dynamic linking in grep

[Paul Eggert]

On 01/21/2011 11:16 AM, Reuben Thomas wrote:
>> Won't this have bad performance on multicore machines,
>> > compared to doing the decompression in a separate process?
> If it does, you can do the decompression in a separate process.

Sorry, I don't follow.  In the common case where I'm
doing a 'grep -r', and some files are compressed but
others are not, how can I, as a 'grep' user, do the decompression
in a separate process?  I don't see any easy way to do that.

>> > Has the performance of this change been tested recently
>> > on modern machines?
> No.

I suggest trying it out, and doing decompression either in
grep (using zlib) or in a separate process (using gzip), before
committing to the former implementation.  No doubt it depends
on the data, but it could be that in typical cases the
separate-process approach is faster on modern processors.
Also, the separate-process approach is likely to be easier
to implement and easier for the user to plug in their own
decompressor.