My early benchmarks show it to be 10x faster than a simple buffer created with tie and 20x faster than String::IO!
Sounds interesting.. I'd appreciate it if you could post your benchmark code.
I haven't yet looked at perl 5.8.0 but looking at comments made by other developers the improvements are quite exciting. For one, I believe that Perl's use of it's own IO subsystem in place of that provided by the underlying OS will make Perl even more platform independant.
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# Under Construction