Re: [boost] File Handle and FILE* wrappers?

On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 9:29 PM, Rob Stewart wrote:

On December 15, 2014 6:25:44 PM EST, Nat Goodspeed wrote:

...

Interestingly, I just stumbled across a bit of live legacy code that relies on __gnu_cxx::stdio_filebuf to allow constructing an istream or ostream from an open FILE*. This does not port to libc++.

...

What surprised me was that I could find no support for FILE* in Boost.Iostreams. Writing a streambuf isn't rocket science, but I would think that this particular use case would be common enough to warrant library support.

FILE* is buffered and streambuf provides buffering. You can create a streambif that doesn't actually do any buffering, but it is contrary to the purpose of one.

Very true. I surmise that the purpose of this functionality is to provide an adapter between code that opens a FILE* and code that wants to write to a std::ostream (or read from a std::istream). Another approach would be to dig into the provider of the FILE* and rewrite its own file handling in terms of fstream. That may or may not be more work than writing a streambuf adapter from scratch. It would certainly be more work than simply using a FILE*-based streambuf from a library, which is what I was hoping to find.