On Fri, May 10, 2002 at 02:07:02PM -0700, John M McIntosh wrote:
> 
> If Squeak had buffered file io in the smalltalk layer this type of 
> test would of course run faster.

I wonder if that's actually the case. Most of the Squeak VMs are using
the stdio library for file IO, which is already buffered, and which on
many platforms is already making use of an OS buffer cache.  Adding
another layer of buffering in Smalltalk might just slow things down.

The Windows support code is using Win32 calls (e.g. WriteFile rather
than fwrite). I'm not sure how that behaves, but I suspect there is
some IO buffering in there somewhere.

My completely untested speculation is that adding IO buffering in the
image would be useful for Squeak NOS, but not much else.

Dave