9fans archive / 1993 / 07 / 3 /    prev next

From: Icarus Sparry I.Sparry@ss1...
Subject: sfio vs bio
Date: Mon, 5 Jul 1993 06:06:20 -0400

David Korn and Kiem-Phong Vo have just released a new version of sfio,
the 'Safe Fast I/O' package, which is designed as a replacement for
stdio.

The paper 'How to use the Plan 9 C Compiler' tells us "Bio is a small
and very efficient, particularly for buffer-at-a-time or line-at-a-time
I/O. Even for character-at-a-time I/O, however, it is significantly
faster than the Standard I/O library"

Before I do it, has anyone else measured these two on similar hardware
(e.g.  Sun Sparc-Station 2, running SunOS)? The paper with sfio gives
some figures for Andrew Humes FIO package and some existing stdio
packages.

Sfio has more facilities, e.g. you can define error handlers for
streams, and can make use of operating system facilities like memory
mapped files.

Icarus