fileio vs FUP

• Date: Fri, 21 Feb 1997 17:06:48 PST
• From:
  Ken Fox <fox@ares.mars.org>

Several people have written to me asking what the difference between
FUP and fileio is.  Here are the important reasons I write fileio
instead of using FUP for my own project:

FUP's primary file reading and writing operations work on lists.
Reading from the file returns a list and writing to a file is a
single atomic action that writes a list.

Fileio's primary interface is stdio-style streams.  Opening a file
returns a handle that can be used as an argument to functions that
write or read to the file as a stream.  

FUP has no provision for binary I/O and may allow raw binary data
into a MOO string (corrupting the database).  Fileio uses a system
for binary I/O similar to the network functions.

There are also a number of potential efficency problems with FUP.
When FUP is reading from a file, it uses listappend which
potentially allocates a new list for each line being read.  Writing
to a file involves copying the file to a temporary file, adding
lines, and renaming it. 

--Ken
fox@mars.org

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