"Hurd, Matthew" <hurdm@sig.com> writes:
On Behalf Of Sean Kelly
What remains an issue in my mind is how far to take this. Socket and file classes for each platform at least... what else?
Waitable timers would be the other "main" one I'd guess.
Unfortunately, I do not believe that it is possible to wait on both a timer and a file descriptor on POSIX platforms, so this is the same situation as mutexes (see below).
Some process abstractions might be straight forward for "kill" signals and the windows equivalent.
Signal handling abstraction is probably best done by a separate library. Signals are useful for dealing with asynchronous i/o on POSIX platforms, but I would recommend that non-blocking, but not asynchronous I/O be used by the library on those platforms.
I would still like to see mutexes, timers, socket i/o and file i/o all with similar acquisition concepts so there is a hope of marrying them down the track if it is not done up front.
I believe it has been concluded that there is pretty much no way at all of efficiently waiting on both a mutex and a file descriptor on most POSIX platforms, including Linux and BSD. Furthermore, it is also inefficient on Windows, since it requires use of WaitForMultipleObjects, which doesn't scale well. I would not recommend that an i/o multiplexing attempt to handle mutexes and timers.
[snip]
-- Jeremy Maitin-Shepard