On 1/28/18 12:35 AM, Paul Raulerson wrote:
This is a funny area to compare though, since on most platforms, C
file access is always a binary stream. The application pretty much
defines the way the file is treated - byte by byte, record by record,
block by block, buffer size by buffer size, etc. To load an image for
instance, it is pretty common to fstat() the image file to get its
size, malloc() a buffer of the appropriate size, then do a single
read() or fread() to populate the buffer. It is extremely efficient on
most platforms, often due to the OS buffering.
Going even further, many platforms allow a file to be mapped into an
application's address space. I work with an unmanaged C++ Windows
application that does CreateFile() to open a file, GetFileSize() to get
the size of the file and then CreateFileMapping() to map the file into
the app's address space. At that point, the app doesn't need any I/O
functions to process the file, it just accesses the contents as memory
and lets the paging system handle the I/O. (And I think we like to
believe that most operating systems go to great lengths to optimize
paging logic.) *nix platforms have mmap() to provide similar functionality.
