'cat' and 'rm' as builtins ?

[Tim Rühsen]

Hi,

currently, some GNU people are developing ideas and code to speed up the GNU 
toolchain (autotools, make).

A simple ./configure for wget calls 'cat' ~2000 times, same with 'rm'.
This sums up to a roughly 5-10% of the overall time used in ./configure.

Since cat and rm implementations are pretty small in code size, I wonder if 
you (the maintainers) would accept patches to make these commands builtin 
commands.

To keep backward compatibility for sure, these builtins could be disabled by 
default. A following small change in autotools could enable these.

My current plan is to use the builtin code for 'cat' only when no options are 
given. If options are given, fall back to fork/exec.

With 'rm' I would use builtin code for no options, for -r and for -f (and -r/-
f combined), else fall back to fork/exec.

WDYT ?

Regards, Tim

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