On Wed, 2010-08-18, Stefan Sperling wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 11:57:11PM +0200, Stefan Fuhrmann wrote:
> > I overgeneralized my use-case here: I actually needed "move forward" only.
> > The concept of "skip N bytes", however, is perfectly in line with
> > the general
> > stream semantics. Because this also fits my needs, I changed the API in
> > r986485 accordingly.
>
> But the stream implementation may still need to read all bytes until N
> anyway, to make sure the internal state is still valid after moving to
> offset N.
>
> Of course, we could say that a stream implementation is free to optimize
> for this use case if possible, but allow wrapper streams to override
> the "move forward" implementation.
>
> For instance, a stream wrapping an APR file would support "move forward",
> but as soon as you wrap this APR file stream with a translation stream,
> the translation stream's semantics take over and the APR file stream
> will effectively be read byte-per-byte when the "move forward" method
> is called on the translation stream. This would allow the translation stream
> to keep its internal state intact during a "move forward" operation.
>
> Performance benefits would then depend on the type of stream being used.
>
> Does this make sense?
Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking. Sounds good.
- Julian
Received on 2010-08-18 12:46:03 CEST