Restructured version of the Streams library

[Takano Akio]

Hi Bulat,

On Tue, 13 Jun 2006 20:08:16 +0400
Bulat Ziganshin <bulat.ziganshin at gmail.com> wrote:
> first i considered your library as ready-to-use alternative to Streams
> and was discouraged. but then i understood that it is only
> proof-of-concept for alternative class structure and realized that for
> this purpose it serves very well - everything works just as it should
> work, every bit of Simon's critique about monolithic Stream class was
> taken into account

Yes, I deliberately published the library in the early stage, in order
to show the design to you and other people interested in the area.
If the design will be used by the Streams library, I will consider it a
success and be satisfied. Otherwise, I will develop it into a
fully-featured library.

> moreover, you've implemented this w/o duplicating functionality in
> read, write and read/write classes and virtually w/o speed penalty, by
> creating "manager" (you call it Controller) class to switch between
> reading and writing Port behavior

Now I have got rid of the Controlled class. This change introduces a
overhead when more than one read/write buffering transformers are used
together, but I think it is a rare case.

> about your example of using UTF8+Latin1 encoding on one stream: it
> shouldn't work for using any encoding AFTER UTF8 (i don't have Unix,
> so i not compiled your lib and don't make actual tests). imagine that
> first 10 bytes in file represent 8 UTF8 chars. after decoding, these
> chars will be represented by 32 bytes (8 UTF-32 values). when you make
> sCleanup, library just can't know what those 32 bytes read from
> intermediate buffer correspond to 10 bytes in lower-level stream

Thank you for pointing out the design flaw. I'm going to fix it.

> i also specially mentioned your implementation of locking transformer.
> if i correctly understood, it allows to add locking even when stream
> is used by two transformer paths (such as UTF8+Latin1), in contrast
> to my library

Yes, that is my intention.

Regards,
Takano Akio