I would guess mmap: view it as a char[]. With flash storage and ubiquitous page-cache the read/write/seek reading-needle abstraction is kind of moot. Triggering

I would guess mmap: view it as a char[]. With flash storage and ubiquitous page-cache the read/write/seek reading-needle abstraction is kind of moot. Triggering a syscall on seek when you could just pass an offset to every read is a bit disturbing. It's probably because of this that most languages provide buffered readers even tho the underlying file is already buffered by the kernel.