I am preparing a lecture on files for the more junior students in programming class. One of the points I want to elaborate are good practices with files.
What are the thing to keep in mind when using files in any programming language?
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I am preparing a lecture on files for the more junior students in programming class. One of the points I want to elaborate are good practices with files.
What are the thing to keep in mind when using files in any programming language?
I’ve found that junior programmers often have poor intuition or learned incorrect lessons about the speed of accessing files.
Very new programmers assume that files are very fast and need help understanding why reading one byte at a time from an unbuffered file is a bad idea. Similarly, accessing directory information can be very slow and should be cached if possible.
Unfortunately, some more experienced programmers learn the wrong lesson and assume that everything always needs to be cached in RAM or it will be too slow. Modern operating systems have very sophisticated disk caches, so the second time you access the same part of a file might be significantly faster.
Finally, interactive programs should do all file operations in another thread, so your application doesn’t slow to a crawl or stop working when the disk is busy, or when a remote volume is temporarily unavailable.