Sebastian Redl wrote:
Hi,
A few weeks ago, a discussion that followed the demonstration of the binary_iostream library made me think about the standard C++ I/O and what I would expect from an I/O model.
Now I have a preliminary design document ready and would like to have some feedback from the Boost community on it.
The document can be found here: http://windmuehlgasse.getdesigned.at/newio/
Nice to hear someone is working on this. I really think that C++ needs a whole new IO system. My main complaints about iostreams are: -> Bad performance: It's really hard to get good performance for a conforming iostream implementation. Implementors need to start hacking around with watermarking and other tricks. No virtual calls for each character insertion, please. Stringstream is a bad substitute for sprintf. So the new IO needs to be designed from the ground as a high performance IO system. -> Big size: Even if iostreams are not used in the application (say we are using printf), the runtime and cout/cin initialization guarantees have some size overhead. That's why some embedded library vendors offer disabling iostreams from their libraries at compilation time. -> Hard formatting: printf/scanf are much easier to use and they don't need several hundred of function calls to do their job. The operator<< overloading is also a problem if each call needs some internal locking. A formatting syntax that can minimize the locking needs would be a good choice. I would be really happy with a type-safe printf (variadic templates to the rescue). Regards, Ion