Extended STL, Volume 1: Collections and Iterators

Chapter 31. Gathering Scattered I/O

	Power sits poorly on those who grow up in it.
	--John O’Halloran

	Tell an Australian he is not allowed to tap-dance and he will rush out to buy tap shoes.
	--Simon Briggs

Introduction

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that STL is nice and abstract and all that, but it just doesn’t perform well. I poke holes in that myth in several places in this book (Sections 17.1.1, 19.1.1, 27.9, 36.2.2, and 38.2.1)—but this chapter blows it clean out of the water.

The subject matter of this chapter is Scatter/Gather I/O (also known as Scatter I/O), which means the exchange of data between application code and (usually kernel) I/O routines in the form of multiple blocks per action. Its primary intent is to allow client code to manipulate ...