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Yes.

Whenever you need better performance and reliability, identify an abstraction beloved of CS professors, and bypass it.

When I last checked, libtorrent was utterly failing to use O_DIRECT semantics. I started making a patch, but there are several places that do file ops, and the main one was more complicated than I could afford to dive into at the time.




So... don't bypass abstractions, unless you actually have time to do a better job, no?

We have abstractions for a reason. We have lower-level primitives for a reason. Understanding the differences, reasoning about all trade-off angles, and making the right choice in each project is a majority of the software engineering job.


> So... don't bypass abstractions, unless you actually have time to do a better job, no?

And unless there's a clear benefit to it. If you haven't identified the abstraction as a significant bottleneck, then is it really worthwhile to go through the trouble of bypassing it?




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