Re: Are We Back to the "Wars" Now ?

186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:

On 11/24/24 2:14 PM, Richard Kettlewell wrote:

Lew Pitcher <lew.pitcher@digitalfreehold.ca> writes:

On Sun, 24 Nov 2024 14:25:10 +0000, Rich wrote:

186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:

On 11/23/24 4:25 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

That???s irrelevant.  Pipes originated on the earliest Unix machine,
which was a PDP-11 with only a 64kiB address space.  They work great
for pumping around gigabytes of data, but you don???t need
gigabyte-sized memory buffers to do that.

>
   It all has to be SOMEWHERE ... if not in RAM then
   on a mass storage device.

>
Nope, at least not with pipes.

>
Hold on a sec.... pipes are /buffered/ in RAM, so there's at least
a small bit of ram set aside for each open pipe.

 
The word ???all??? isn???t just decoration.  The claim was ???it all has to be
somewhere???, and Rich???s point (as I understand it) is that it does not
all have to be somewhere.
 
For example,
 
   head -c $((1024*1024*1024)) /dev/urandom | sha256sum
 
puts a gigabyte of data through a pipe, but at no point does anything
allocate anywhere close to a gigabyte of storage of any kind.

 
 
  There's truth here ... the gigabyte gets kinda 'spread out'.
 
  But what if it was ten GB, or 100 ?
 
  So, if you wanna count on sending vast quantities of
  data in pipes, go ahead - it'll almost always work.
 
  Until vids go 16k or something ...
 
  As said LONG back ... each developer has to make
  decisions based on their app and the 'likely'
  systems/usage. There isn't really a 'wrong' or
  'right' way here - just 'alternatives'. I like
  terse pipes, you may not care.

You keep ignoring the piped-to program, it's running concurrently
(or with multiple cores, simultaneously) as long as it keeps reading
from the pipe the pipe will never fill up.