3 ms·
Sometimes writing to the terminal can be the slowest part because it's unbuffered by default in an interactive prompt, so even just redirecting stdout to /dev/n
by arjie 11y ago
Sometimes writing to the terminal can be the slowest part because it's unbuffered by default in an interactive prompt, so even just redirecting stdout to /dev/null (or even a file) can be faster. Had that happen some ten years ago, so my explanation could be out of date or misremembered but the effect was real.
- btilly 11y agoYour explanation is correct. That is the semantics of Unix stdio buffering as implemented by glibc. So across a wide variety of languages, you'll see a significant performance difference if you are doing lots of writes to the terminal. On the other hand if you didn't do this, then interactive terminal programs would be entirely unusable.