Faster reader (Re: Startup time in guile-1.3 (II))

[Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj@nada.kth.se>]

Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj@nada.kth.se> writes:

> It's completely insane to do that much work for every character
> being read in the innermost loop of the reader.

What about letting the reader read one full line (or more) at a time
into an internal buffer and then use a simple character pointer to
read the individual characters?

(BTW, what was that pre_read and pre_write change about?  I saw that
 pre_read seems to flush output when switching to read.  But isn't
 this made automatically by STDIO?  I think reading is one of the
 conditions when output is flushed.  What else did this change
 handle?)

/mdj