Re: Thoughts on the recent ICFP contest

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

Wes Groleau wrote:
> 
>>>to transmit an entire buffer at once, rather than one component at a
>>
>>  Like marshalling all those 'Writes to a buffer, then making one
>>socket'write(buffer) call?
> 
> 
> Have I missed the point all this time?
> I thought that 'Write recursively used
> all the component 'Writes to pack the
> object into a stream, and then the
> possibly dispatching operations of the
> stream would determine the method of
> transmission.

As a point of reference, perhaps you should see this post: 
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=streams+stream_io+group:comp.lang.ada+author:dennison%40telepath.com&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=94hjbp%24ks6%241%40nnrp1.deja.com&rnum=4
from a couple of years ago.

The issue is that each 'Write on a "leaf object" (a non-compound object) 
will result in its own call to the stream's Write routine. That means if 
I do a 'Write on a 1K string, the stream's Write routine gets called 
1024 times. That's a lot of overhead, not to mention that many stream 
objects might be way more efficient with one Write of 1K than they are 
with 1024 one-byte writes. That is certianly the case with Gnat's 
Ada.Streams.Stream_IO

This issue has come up here many times before. The answer is always that 
the user should either call the stream's Write routine themselves 
directly with the entire buffer, or overload their object's 'Write 
attribute with their own routine that does that.

I'm thinking it would be nice to have an object that does this for you, 
rather than everyone always having to go out and write this same code.