New gen_stream behaviour

[Jay Nelson]

Bjorn,

I pushed a new behaviour to stdlib called gen_stream which implements  
a process-striped buffer for reading files, binaries or generated  
streams as a serial set of data blocks.  This is a complete rewrite  
of a submission I made at the end of 2007 (see http://www.duomark.com/ 
erlang/proposals/gen_stream.html for the original background on the  
project).

I created a fairly thorough gen_stream_SUITE.erl and official  
documentation in the gen_stream.xml file.  It is stable enough to  
use, although I need to add some more tests to the SUITE (timeout,  
hibernate, ignore and stop on initialization, code_change, and an  
example behaviour that uses dets handles which must be maintained in  
the module state.  I also need to debug issues I am having on a  
single core laptop with too many processes (not sure if this is the  
implementation or a problem with the external behaviour module  
example I am testing with).

The API is slightly changed from the original; the API for the  
behaviour is more different from the original.  I added the ability  
to pass a transform fun or mfa to reformat each data block as it is  
written to internal buffers.  This allows newline delimited text to  
be split efficiently, and allows for any arbitrary transformation of  
the data type or format but only independently within each block of  
data.

Will this module require an EEP?

You can retrieve the new code from my account:

git fetch git://github.com/jaynel/otp.git gen_stream

jay