Re: Adding streams for standard out and standard err

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
> Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 16:40:10 +0200
> 
> On 07/21/2016 04:21 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> >   . We already have (append-to-file START END FILENAME), which can be
> >     used to write a buffer or a string to a file.  FILENAME can be
> >     "/dev/stderr" on Posix platforms, for example, or it can be a real
> >     file name.
> 
> Wouldn't the proposed primitives often be more efficient than 
> append-to-file, since they would use stdio buffering?

Probably.  But is performance relevant to the use cases we intend them
to be used?  I'm not sure; I've got the impression that the use cases
Phillip had in mind are all in the context of debugging.  After all,
why else would you want to write something to a standard stream in an
_interactive_ session?  And how is performance relevant to debugging
printfs?

> Presumably people using the new primitives would know about their 
> problems with tty and/or GUI frames, just as they know about the similar 
> problems that append-to-file has with /dev/stderr.

I'm not so sure.  But that's not the important part of my reasoning.