Efficient Stream_IO

[Lutz Donnerhacke <lutz@iks-jena.de>]

Is there a portable way to implement efficient IO on streams?
Especially String to Stream_Element_Array conversions?

I do have the problem, that my Ada implementation of a netflow collector
requires considerably more CPU cycles than the C implementation. Of course,
I have to profile the code in detail, but I suspect String'Read/Write as
iterated Character'Reads/Writes as a major contribution.

An unportable implementation would be:

-- Don't do this!
procedure Put(Stream : access Root_Stream_Type'Class; s : String) is
  data : Stream_Element_Array(1 .. s'Length);
  pragma Import(Ada, data);
  for data'Address use s'Address;
  pragma Assert(Stream_Element_Array'Component_Size = String'Component_Size);
  pragma Assert(data'Size = s'Size);
begin
  Write(Stream, data);
end Put;