Front page | perl.perl5.porters |
Postings from April 2012
On Thu, 5 Apr 2012, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 01, 2010 at 01:25:44PM -0400, Andy Dougherty wrote:
> > > How do I enable sfio support in perl? A colleague did it a few years
> > > who and archived vast performance improvements with it. Now I am
> > > tasked with the perl upgrade but do not know where I should start.
>
> My understanding after some digging is that it used to be -Dusesfio
> -Duseperlio passed to ./Configure (along with sfio.h found in the include
> search path) but Configure was tweaked so that -Dusesfio would automatically
> turn on -Duseperlio.
>
> "was tweaked" seems to have been a patch from me. But 12 years ago.
> My memory is hazy on these things by now.
>
> Vast performance improvements vs what? stdio? And which version of perl
> (significance of this question is below)
>
> > I had fiddled with sfio some years ago, but didn't see any significant
> > performance improvements in any of my work.
> >
> > Where does one obtain sfio nowadays?
>
> And here the thread seemed to die.
I think we should simply say that -Dusesfio (attempting to load the sfio
compatibility library) is no longer be supported. I was never able to
produce those "vast performance improvements," it doesn't currently work,
and, as you correctly noted, the sfio support isn't really integrated into
the PerlIO "system" anyway. This has been true for nearly a decade. As
far as I can determine, removing sfio doesn't really remove any useful
functionality or reduce efficiency or break existing working code.
Up until recently, there was also no harm in leaving it in, since it was
mostly out of the way, but my vague recollection is that there was
something relatively recently where the sfio stuff was in the way.
It's probably fair to say we never really used sfio well -- the only thing
we ever did was use the simplest stdio emulation it provides, not any of
its more advanced features.
--
Andy Dougherty doughera@lafayette.edu
Thread Previous