simpler I/O buffering [was: RE: An IO Question from a Newbie]

[Dean Herington]

I've long thought that I/O buffering behavior--not just in Haskell, but 
in most places I've encountered it--was unnecessarily complicated.  
Perhaps it could be simplified dramatically by treating it as strictly a 
performance optimization.  Here's a sketch of the approach.

Writing a sequence of characters across the interface I'm proposing is a 
request by the writing program for those characters to appear at their 
destination "soon".  Ideally, "soon" would be "immediately"; however, the 
characters' appearance may deliberately be delayed ("buffered"), for 
efficiency, as long as such delay is "unobtrusive" to a human user of the 
program.  Buffering timeouts would depend on the device; for a terminal, 
perhaps 50-100 ms would be appropriate.  Such an interval would tend not 
to be noticeable to a human user but would be long enough to effectively 
collect, say, an entire line of output for output "in one piece".  The use 
of a reasonable timeout would avoid the confusing behavior where a 
newline-less prompt doesn't appear until the prompted data is entered.

With this scheme, I/O buffering no longer has any real semantic content.  
(In particular, the interface never guarantees indefinite delay in 
outputting written characters.  Line buffering, if semantically important, 
needs to be done above the level of this interface.)  Hence, buffering 
control could be completely eliminated from the interface.  However, I 
would retain it to provide (non-semantic) control over buffering.  The 
optional buffer size currently has such an effect.  A timeout value could 
be added for fine tuning.  (Note that a timeout of zero would have an 
effect similar to Haskell's current NoBuffering.)  Lastly, the "flush" 
operation would remain, as a hint that it's not worth waiting even the 
limited timeout period before endeavoring to make the characters appear.

Is such an approach feasible?  Has it been implemented anywhere?  Would 
such behavior best be implemented by the operating system?  Could it be 
implemented by the runtime system?

Dean