alt Hacker NewsSo to be clear, you believe every program that outputs a bulk stream to stdout should be written to check if stdout is a socket and enable Nagle's algorithm if so? That's not just busywork - it's also an abstraction violation. By explicitly turning off Nagle's, you specify that you understand TCP performance and don't need the abstraction, and this is a reasonable way to do things. Imagine if the kernel pinned threads to cores by default and you had to ask to unpin them...
No, the program should take care to enable TCP_NODELAY when creating the socket. If the program gets passed a FD from outside it's on the outside program to ensure this. If somehow the program very often gets outside FDs from an oblivious source that could be a TCP socket, then it might indeed have to manually check if it really wants Nagle's algorithm.