Re: request for review: Doing direct file I/O in Emacs Lisp

[John Wiegley <johnw@gnu.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> Could you tell me more?  What data does eshell want to write into
> files?  Where is the data coming from?  Is it coming from
> subprocesses started by eshell, or is it generated from eshell
> itself?

Like Kai said, output comes both from eshell (Lisp) and subprocesses.

Requiring all data to pass through a buffer, in order to save it to
disk, is difficult to handle efficiently.  Because the whole file must
be stored in the buffer before being saved, it consumes unnecessary
amounts of memory and processor time.

One could make the argument that Emacs shouldn't be doing the work of
a shell, and so shouldn't need this kind of efficiency.  But having a
command shell integrated with Lisp -- that works on all platforms --
has been so useful to me, that I'd really like it to be more efficient
if it's not too much trouble.

John