This is probably not of major importance, however I have noticed during testing that the performance of the print statement and also stdout is much faster in the Dart-Editor than from the command-line. From the command-line the performance of print takes around 36% longer than using stdout from the command-line. However, running the program from within the editor, using stdout takes around 900% longer than using the print statement in the editor, but both are considerably faster than from the command-line. ie. Print from a program running in the editor takes around 2.65% of the time it takes from the command-line.
Some relative timings based on average performance from my test :
Running program from command line (5000 iterations) :
print 1700 milliseconds.
stdout 1245 milliseconds.
Running program within Dart-Editor (5000 iterations) :
print 45 milliseconds
stdout 447 milliseconds.
Can someone explain to me the reason for these differences – in particular why performance in the Dart-Editor is so much faster? Also, is it acceptable practice to use stdout and what are the pros and cons versus using print?
Why is the Dart Editor faster?
Because the output handling by the command line is just really slow, and this blocks the output stream, and subsequently the call to print/stdout.
You can test this for yourself - test the following java program (with your own paths, of course):
public static void main(String[] args) {
try {
// the dart file does print and stdout in a loop
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("C:\\eclipse\\dart-sdk\\bin\\dart.exe D:\\DEVELOP\\Dart\\Console_Playground\\bin\\console_playground.dart");
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(p.getInputStream()));
StringBuffer buf = new StringBuffer();
String line;
while((line = in.readLine()) != null) {
buf.append(line + "\r\n");
}
System.out.print(buf.toString());
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
On my machine, this is even slightly faster than the Dart Editor (which probably does something like buffering the input and rendering it periodically, but I don't really know).
You will also see that adding a Thread.sleep(1); into the loop will severely impact the performance of the dart program, because the stream is blocked.
Should stdout be used?
I think that's highly subjective. I, for one, do whatever lets me write code more quickly. When i just want to dump a variable, i use print(myvar);. But with stdout, you can do neat stuff like this: stdout.addStream(new File(r"D:\test.csv").openRead());. Of course, if performance is an issue, it depends on how your application will be used - for example, called by another program (where print is faster) vs. command line (where stdout is faster, for some reason).
Why is stdout faster in command line?
I have no idea, sorry. It's the only environment I tested where print() is slower, so I'd guess it has something to do with how the console handles incoming data.
