Re: [cs] pipe infrastructure support

[Mike Stump <mrs at apple dot com>]

On Tuesday, September 23, 2003, at 06:23  PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> Mike Stump <mrs@apple.com> writes:
>
> > This adds piping infrastructure to libiberty for the compile server,
> > so that we can connect servers and local processes together,
> > arbitrarily.
>
> This looks like a poor shadow of what I tried to do back in January.
> The patch was shot down for reasons which I consider completely bogus.
>
> http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2003-01/msg02331.html

Better idea: get rid of collect2 it is a figment of our imagination 
that has outlived all usefulness.  Once you do that, all these issues 
disappear, and the time waste that was fork and exec.

By this, I don't mean remove the functionality, I mean, have:

	fork(exec(collect2("args")))

be replaced by:

	collect2(arg1, arg2)

as in a normal C subroutine.  This avoids all the issues that DJ 
doesn't like _and_ improves the portability of it.  I'll do all this 
work at some point, just for the speedup we get from it, but I have 
other work that gets more (~2x) that I have to do first.

I intend to get this change into libiberty.  I must have it for the 
compile server.  Now, if someone rather that some of the code that is 
the most non-portable go into libiberty and sit behind nice APIs, well, 
I don't think that would be bad.  But, at the limit, underneath it all, 
I have to have the fd for the pipe, no way around this.