Re: [boost] [filesystem] Some questions about string use

From: Chris Frey (cdfrey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-04-28 22:17:16

On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 03:21:47PM -0400, Caleb Epstein wrote:
> Beman, is this on your radar screen at all?  I last tried to ping you about
> it in March.
> 
> To refresh, Boost.Filesystem seems to use the POSIX pathconf call
> excessively, which hurts performance when doing recursive operations like
> UNIX's find(1) command.

Performance has been a problem with Boost::Filesystem for at least a year.
Back when I mentioned it, the "party line" :-) was that the API was top priority
and performance would be something that could be looked at later.

With the standards committees looking at including Boost::Filesystem
in TR2, I think performance is imporant enough to be looked at by now.

You can read some early testing from June 2005 here:
        http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2005/06/87696.php

Using POSIX calls or native directory calls isn't that hard, and people
can code this themselves with greater speed than Boost::Filesystem.
I know that I did this for my application, which I think is unfortunate,
since a fast, cross-platform filesystem API would be useful, especially
in the standard.  But it loses its utility when it can't keep up with find(1).

- Chris