> On May 20, 2016, at 1:16 AM, Quinn The Eskimo! via swift-users
> <swift-users@swift.org> wrote:
>
> One of the nice things about the file system is that it has reasonable
> performance and error characteristics such that you /can/ deal with it
> synchronously. Revel in that fact!
That’s only really true at small scales, for local filesystems, under light I/O
loads. This happens to be true most of the time* for typical Mac/iOS app needs,
but it’s not universal.
I believe most people in the Swift community today come from a Mac/iOS
background, but as Linux support matures, and with IBM’s backing, that’s going
to be less and less true in the future. Me, I’m one of the oddball “mobile
guys” at a database company [Couchbase] whose customers [eBay, PayPal, Citi,
etc.] very commonly have multi-terabyte data sets.
> Consider the NSXMLDocument example again. This high-level one-shot API is
> layered on top of a low-level one-shot API.
The trouble with this is that those one-shot APIs tend to suck when working
with data coming from the network, because you have to buffer the entire data
set in memory, and you can’t start parsing it until the entire response is
finished. If it does finish — there are protocols like XMPP/Jabber that use
indefinitely-long streams of structured data like XML and can’t be parsed at
all with one-shot APIs. I’ve recently had to replace NSJSONSerialization with a
3rd-party streaming JSON parser library, because the latency of reading large
JSON documents over HTTP was getting in the way of performance and memory
requirements.
Sorry if this is off-topic! What’s relevant is that I’d hate to see Apple’s
historical bias toward one-shot I/O get in the way of Swift’s Foundation
framework having a kick-ass stream API.
—Jens
* But not always. I can attest that during OS startup, when dozens of processes
are contending for the disk, reading a 10MB file can take an achingly long time
by normal standards. This caused lots of “fun” during performance tuning of the
PubSub framework. Also, remember the days when devs at Apple still had
NFS-based home directories?
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