Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!uxc!iuvax!bobmon
From: bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Fork and process creation
Message-ID: <21236@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 26 May 89 15:07:35 GMT
Reply-To: bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante)
Organization: malkaryotic
Lines: 11

cgeisler@water.waterloo.edu (Craig Eisler) <2361@water.waterloo.edu> :
-
-Pipes are a nice feature, but they are anything but cheap.
-They are file I/O.  Too damn slow.  ...

[minor nit, maybe...]  I think you say this because you're thinking of
MSDOS pipes, which are just temporary files and require disk I/O.  In
Unix a pipe involves file system calls (so it "looks like" low-level
file I/O to a process), but the writes and reads never go beyond the
file buffer in memory.  This eliminates the major bottleneck and makes
a LOT more sense, given the ability to set the buffer size.