Overview of Streams

Streams are the fundamental method for reading and writing data used by GMime. You'll probably notice that the basic API is similar to that of the low-level Unix I/O layer (read(), write(), lseek(), etc) with some additional niceties such as a printf-like function.

The three (3) basic stream types are: GMimeStreamFile, GMimeStreamFs and GMimeStreamMem. You can manipulate all three streams using the GMimeStream interfaces. In addition, some of these streams have extended interfaces to allow more fine grained manipulation.

GMimeStreamFile and GMimeStreamFs are very similar in that they are both meant for reading and writing data to the file system (in the form of files). Since GMimeStreamFile is an abstracted layer above the standard libc FILE type, one of the added benefits is buffered I/O. GMimeStreamFs, on the other hand, is an abstracted layer above Unix file descriptors. While a GMimeStreamFs can be used on top of a UNIX socket or pipe, you must be careful because sockets and pipes are not seekable (see GMimeStreamPipe for a solution to this).

Unlike the previous 2 stream types, GMimeStreamMem does not interact with the file system at all (except maybe the swap partition/file indirectly). Memory streams are handy when you want reads and writes to be nearly instantaneous and/or if you don't want to create a temporary file on disk.

The five (5) advanced stream types are GMimeStreamMmap, GMimeStreamNull, GMimeStreamPipe, GMimeStreamBuffer and GMimeStreamFilter.

Our most simple stream, GMimeStreamNull, is the stream equivalent of /dev/null on Unix systems. The main difference is that GMimeStreamNull records the number of bytes written to it - you may find this useful if you need to know the number of bytes a GMimeObject (for example) will require.

GMimeStreamMmap is a memory-mapped stream. This isn't guaranteed to work on all systems since not all systems support the POSIX mmap system call, but for those that do - this might present a faster stream than GMimeStreamFs and/or GMimeStreamFile. You'll have to do some experimentation to know for sure.

GMimeStreamPipe is just like GMimeStreamFs except that it doesn't support seeking, thus being perfect for use with sockets and pipes.

The GMimeStreamBuffer can be used on top of any other type of stream and has 3 modes: block reads, block writes, and cached reads. Block reads are especially useful if you will be making a lot of small reads from a stream that accesses the file system. Block writes are useful for very much the same reason. The final mode, cached reads, can become memory intensive but can be very helpful when inheriting from a stream that does not support seeking (Note: this mode is the least tested so be careful using it).

Our final stream type, GMimeStreamFilter, can also be used on top of another stream. This stream, as you may have guessed, filters reads and writes to its inherited stream. For example, one could write a compression filter and apply it to a GMimeStreamFilter and any further reads or writes would be (un)compressed.