3 ms·

I don't know, I've never done anything where code needed to have runtime dispatch on the kind of file it has without also knowing anything about what kind of fi

• vore 4y ago
  Have you never used C++ iostreams? Or the Python file abstraction? Or Rust std::io::Read/std::io::Write? Or Node.js streams? Or DOM Web Streams? Or Ruby files? Or Haskell conduits? Or hell, fopencookie/funopen in C? The abstraction is super common and allows you to connect streams to each other without worrying about the underlying mechanism, which 99% of the time I don't really think you want to worry about unless you're sure it's a performance overhead. And that's great, because I surely don't want to write specializations by hand for all the different combinations of streams I need to use if I don't have to.
  • anonymoushn 4y ago
    I've used open(2) and the io_uring openat :) I use generic readers and writers every day, but they don't have any runtime dispatch. The question was "Why would you do anything except vtables and runtime dispatch?" One answer is that my code that uses generic readers and writers and gets monomorphized gets to also be generic over async-ness.
    • saagarjha 4y ago
      Except in the kernel, of course.
    • vore 4y ago
      There you go, actually: you can have your clean code cake and eat it too if you have the right language abstractions (like parametric polymorphism).