[somenameforme]

Doesn't that break anything relying on the return value? fread gives you the number of objects read as a return. So I think a pretty typical thing would be to fread and then parse that number of characters, and that'd just break?

[jcul]

I've seen a lot of code that just assumes fread / fwrite succeeded without bothering to check the return value...

But in this case if the code was calling fread 65536 times in a loop and getting 64KiB each time it wouldn't be good either!

Sounds like the parent comment had to fix this with the internal cache thing to speed up the small freads. I think they meant the easy fix would have been swapping the args in the original / caller code.

[account42]

There are no small freads in the story, whatever implements those freads supposedly split them up into many calls. But that sound more like a problem of that implementation than the fread callers as size == 1 is correct when you are reading a bag of bytes.

[jcul]

Ah you're right, I misread it.

[koolala]

I think they turned it from a tiny file read to a tiny ram read.

[DonHopkins]

The type of programmer who swaps the args to fread tends to be the type of programmer who doesn't bother to check the return value, fortunately.

Edit: mort96: So did you check the return value or not?

[mort96]

If I have a buffer of bytes, and I intend to treat the content of that buffer as individual bytes, what is semantically wrong with "read 65k 1-byte-sized items into this buffer"? Wouldn't it be a bit unnatural to express it as "read one item whose size is 65k"?

[account42]

But the args aren't necessarily swapped just because they end up in a slow case in some implementation.