Exploring the ideas of throughput (in the context of Contour terminal)

[christianparpart]

Hey @dankamongmen,

not quite actively advertised (on purpose), but Contour does support an additional file descriptor. 0/1/2 is PTY slave connected and file descriptor 3 is a system pipe that can be checked for via STDOUT_FASTPIPE environment variable, too. This is bypassing the bad kernel implementation of PTY semantics and can be used for way faster throughput of text and control sequences.
Now, I wonder if it owuld make sense for you and if you (notcurses) could benefit from such an experimental functionality. Maybe you want to give that locally a try?

Mind, we've tested that on rainbowbench but also cat style via e.g. time cat largefile.txt >&3. Maybe it's worth investigating the possibilities? What do you think?

p.s.: Not sure how many TEs are actually PTY-kernel-bound on performance, but it's worth exploring.