I've enjoyed the how-fast-is-`cat` benchmark for a long time for terminals, but I am sad to say its done. We've finished it. Libghostty processes plain text data faster than both the macOS and Linux kernel can feed it through a pty fd read. It can't get any faster without kernel changes. 😮‍💨

That doesn’t mean we process ALL data faster than a kernel read. Only plain text (both ascii and unicode with full grapheme clustering, btw).

There are still slow OSCs, especially those that have side effects (e.g. clipboard ops). So processing faster than the current can write still has benefits: when we get stalled on slow sequences, we can catch up through the buffer faster on text runs.