C++-What is the need of both buffer and stream?

Question

Although i have read about buffer and stream and it's working with files in c++ but i don't know what is the need of a buffer if a stream is there, stream is always there to transfer the data of one file to the program. So why do we use buffers to store data(performing same task that stream does) and what are buffered and unbuffered stream.

Answer 1

Consider a stream that writes to a file. If there were no buffer, if your program wrote a single byte to the stream, you'd have to write a single byte to the file. That's very inefficient. So streams have buffers to decouple operations one on side of the stream from operations on the other side of the stream.

Answer 2

A buffer and a stream are different concepts.

A buffer is a part of the memory to temporarily store data. It can be implemented and structured in various ways. For instance, if one wants to read a very large file, chunks of the file can be read and stored in the buffer. Once a certain chunk is processed the data can be discarded and the next chunk can be read. A chunk in this case could be a line of the file.

Streams are the way C++ handles input and output. Their implementation uses buffers.

Answer 3

Ok lets lets start from the scratch suppose you want to work with files. For this purpose you would have to manage how the data is entered into your file and if the sending of data into the file was successful or not, and all other basic working problems. Now either you can manage all that on your own which would take a lots a time and hard work or What you can do is you can use a stream.

Yes, you can allocate a stream for such purposes. Streams work with abstraction mechanism ie we c++ programmers don't know how they are working but we only know that we are at the one side of a stream (on our program's side) we offer our data to the stream and it has the responsibility to transfer data from one end to the other (file's side)

Eg-

ofstream file("abc.txt"); //Here an object of output file stream is created
file<<"Hello";            //We are just giving our data to stream and it transfers that
file.close();             //The closing of file

Now if you work with files you should know that working with files is a really expensive operation ie it takes more time to access file than to access memory and we also don't have to perform file operations every time. So programmers created a new feature called buffer which is a part of computer's memory and stores data temporarily for handling files.

Suppose at the place of reading file every time to read data you just read some memory location where all the data of file is copied temporarily.Now it would be a less expensive task as you are reading memory not file.

Those streams that have a buffer for their working ie they open the file and by default copy all the data of file to the buffer are called as buffered streams whereas those streams which don't use any buffer are called as unbuffered streams.

Now if you enter data to a buffered stream then that data will be queued up until the stream is not flushed (flushing means replacing the data of buffer with that of file). Unbuffered streams are faster in working (from the point of user at one end of the stream) as data is not temporarily stored into a buffer and is sent to the file as it comes to the stream.

Answer 4

I do agree that stream is probably the poorest written and the most badly udnerstood part of standard library. People use it every day and many of them have not a slightest clue how the constructs they use work. For a little fun, try asking what is std::endl around - you might find that some answers are funny.

On any rate, streams and streambufs have different responsibilities. Streams are supposed to provide formatted input and output - that is, translate an integer to a sequence of bytes (or the other way around), and buffers are responsible of conveying the sequence of bytes to the media.

Unfortunately, this design is not clear from the implementation. For instance, we have all those numerous streams - file stream and string stream for example - while the only difference between those are the buffer. The stream code remains exactly the same. I believe, many people would redesign streams if they had their way, but I am afraid, this is not going to happen.