I/O interface (was: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Hugs vs GHC (again))

[Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk]

Ben Rudiak-Gould <Benjamin.Rudiak-Gould at cl.cam.ac.uk> writes:

> fileRead can be implemented in terms of OS primitives,

Only if they already support reading from a fixed offset (like pread).
I'm not sure if we can rely on something like this being always
available, or whether it should be emulated using lseek which is safe
only as long as we are the only process using the given open file.

pread requires that the file is seekable, which means that it can't
be used for all file handles: not for pipes, sockets, terminals nor
various other devices.

> and it's easy enough to implement a thread-safe seek/read interface
> on top of it.

Not if it must cooperate with other processes, and you *do* want to
set a file position before running another program with redirected
standard I/O. In this case it's not enough that you set a private
Haskell variable holding its logical file position - you must perform
the lseek syscall.

Doing something differently than everybody else has a risk of limited
interoperability, even if the new way is "better", and thus must be
carefully evaluated to check whether all lost functionality is
unimportant enough to lose.

BTW, on Unix sockets and files are the same, but probably not on
Windows. I don't know details about WinAPI. I know that basic file I/O
uses HANDLEs, winsock uses ints which emulate Unix descriptors; what I
don't know is whether you can also use HANDLEs for sockets (perhaps
each winsock fd has an associated HANDLE with easy translation in both
directions? or is there another API for sockets on HANDLEs?) and how
do you perform redirection of standard I/O, in terms of HANDLEs or
what - in particular I don't know whether you can redirect standard
I/O to a socket. How should Haskell view this? I mean that on Unix it
should somehow make files and sockets interchangeable, in order to
support I/O redirection for programs being run; but it's not easy if
you use completely different interfaces for files and sockets, as the
streams proposal seems to do.

-- 
   __("<         Marcin Kowalczyk
   \__/       qrczak at knm.org.pl
    ^^     http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/