Re: rewrite try_dlopen (2)

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> The getline clone get_line that fell out of this change could in
> principle be replaced by the glibc one (and LIBOBJed on non-glibc
> systems), and its current implementation is still ugly, but I did
> not want to work on this now.  I'd rather do that together with
> switching ltdl from stdio to fd IO sometime soon (as requested).

I am not aware of any advantage to using Unix I/O rather than ANSI C 
standard stdio for reading/writing small files.  C's stdio is buffered 
while read/write are not buffered.  Efficiently using read/write 
requires that the application/library provide its own buffering 
mechanism and parsing functions, which will surely increase code size 
and maintenance.

There are cases where Unix I/O is to be preferred over stdio but 
parsing tiny text files is not one of those cases.  In order to 
effectively use Unix I/O one would want to first slurp the entire file 
into memory since .la files are smaller than a typical disk block. 
If Unix I/O is even to be considered, then why not consider using 
memory-mapped files (e.g mmap())?

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen