Hi Robert, Thanks for contributing to these discussions! I hope that with you and the others involved we can get this long overdue library off the ground. Anyway, to respond to your question: --- Robert Ramey wrote:
The question here is:
Is aio.h interface not sufficient in some way? If not, what facility is it missing? If it is sufficient, then just depend on the available implementation or re-implement the interface in the most convenient way.
Robert Ramey
IMHO, the "io" part of "aio" is the primary thing what makes it insufficient. Unless I misread the man pages, I cannot post custom events or messages with aio; it is all about I/O on file descriptors. Which brings me to the other problem. At least on Windows, a file != socket != pipe != etc (regardless of the quasi-polymorphic WaitForXXX functions). If we constrain the discussion only to sockets, then this approach could be used. Sadly, pipes are a totally different ball game. If memory serves, the CygWin folks "mapped" all such types of objects to fd's, but doing so was very heavy handed. There was no other solution to their particular problem, but that is not the case here since we can invent the interface. The first issue is what spawned to Asynchronicity thread: given a general async mechanism, I/O could be easily adapted to it. The interface could be portable, even given the diverse ways and means necessary to achieve the goal. If we are to adopt an existing interface, I believe that it should be general enough for non-I/O uses. It should also be something that could be implemented on all platforms without undue inefficiency (something a select-style interface could not do, IMO, because of the poor performance of populating fd_set's or their moral equivalent). In a previous post I showed that the async technique I am proposing could be (fairly<g>) easily used to shield the application from library worker thread issues. With a little more work (and coupling), the use of channel.async_call could be encapsulated/automated to simplify the user experience. Best, Don __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Make Yahoo! your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs