Virtual file for fast I/O?

[Jonathon]

Is there any way to create a virutal file in tcc? Disk-based file processing (creation, manipulation, searches, deletion) takes a lot of time. If my scripts could create & manipulate temporary files in memory, I expect processing time would improve.

 

[vefatica]

The short answer is "no". You can create (huge) arrays with TCC and manipulate text in them, but not with the typical text-manipulation commands, and external apps wouldn't be able to access them.

A "ram drive" would be a perfect (and perfectly seamless) solution. There are many available, a few free. Given Windows' dexterity at file cacheing, you might be surprised at how little there is to gain.

 

[MaartenG]

Is there any way to create a virutal file in tcc?

Windows has a special way to create files just in memory (well, sort of) by specifying attribute FILE_ATTRIBUTE_TEMPORARY as part of the CreateFile function in Kernel32.dll.
This will essentialy create a zero byte disk-file, with it's contents in RAM (when you run out of RAM, contents will be written to disk).

With @WINAPI you can call this function.
But this isn't very practical, as you would have to recreate your scripts: you can only access the contents of the file through the %@file.... functions (but that may also be caused by me passing the wrong attributes to the function)

As @vefatica already mentioned: just take a test-drive (no pun intended :-) with a RAM disk (for example Dataram's RAMDisk; free for RAM disks up to 1 GB).
And please let us know if you find differences in performance (I'm very curious about that, but don't have file I/O intensive scripts to test this)