Beman Dawes wrote:
* That is a lot of additional interface complexity to support an optimization that applies to Windows but not POSIX. Some of the other schemes (which involved additional overloads to specific operations functions) had less visible impact on the interface.
* There have been no timings to indicate the inefficiency of the current interface actually impacts production applications.
* AFAICS, there is nothing in the current interface which prevents caching of directory entries. Caching would probably aid more use cases than proposed changes to interfaces. But both caching and user dirent storage introduce serious additional race conditions. Not a good thing. In fact a showstopper unless cache management is introduced, further complicating the interface.
As a data point, PHP does stat caching: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.is-dir.php because of performance issues. Stat caching does apply to POSIX systems as well. Either a transparent caching scheme or is_* overloads taking a directory iterator may work. The race conditions argument isn't very strong. The information returned by is_directory is inherently race-prone, caching or no caching. I won't be surprised if an OS does its own per-process stat caching, for instance.