Re: Bison-1.28a Remove bug

[Hans Aberg]

At 16.21 +0100 0-11-02, Akim Demaille wrote:
>I just checked in the last
>patch, and Bison no longer use any tmp file :)

I think it is good, because I realized how silly it really is to use
temporary files, if the life-time is only for the duration of a single run,
under an OS  supporting memory paging:

Suppose you do not use temporary files, then the program will get a full
all-address space (4 GB if addresses are 32-bit) and create the suitably
paged temporary files for that, and will automatically clean up all
forgotten allocations when the program is taken down. Even if the program
is up and running as a DLL, old allocations will be paged out as they are
not used, and will at least not take up RAM.

But if you use temporary files, then it will be buffered against RAM, and
the difference seems to be that you get an extra write to the disk when the
file is closed before deleted.

>GNU is about POSIX, not ISO C.

Well, it seems me unnecessary to revert to POSIX for a program that does
not use threading. :-)

Specifically, there are a lot of people out there wanting to port software
to PDA's when they become powerful enough, and for such it is very helpful
if programs only use ISO C if possible. (Personal computers seem all using
threading now, and even GCC, so such computers and up, it will be no
problem in the future, it seems.)

By the way, is "unlink" POSIX? -- I though it was merely some stuff that
had survived from the days of C when it was "A". :-)


  Hans Aberg