Anil,

Thanks for the analysis. 

> The I/O loop is being called twice for the non-blocking version, as it 
> receives
> the `Await signal, does the Unix syscall, and then jumps into decode_src. 
> Presumably
> a full non-blocking version would have to register with a select handler if it
> gets an EAGAIN at this point,


Yes.

> In terms of the number of system calls, the non-blocking one is more 
> efficient,
> as it uses a 16KB buffer versus the 4K reads done by the blocking version.


Yes, the 4K reads are a limitation of pervasives channels. For each mechanism I 
used the largest buffer that the OCaml runtime uses. 

> Looking at the two decoders in src/se.ml, it looks like the non-blocking one
> allocates closures on every loop, which the blocking one doesn't. This is so 
> it
> can store the continuation in d.k for the next loop. 


Yes, that's a side effect of writing in continuation passing style in general 
since continuations are often partially applied functions. 

> So to summarise, instead of storing a continuation closure, it would probably 
> be better
> to explicitly store the state in d.k to minimise allocation?


Maybe, but keep in mind that s-expressions are very simple to parse. It may be 
obvious in this case but depending on what you decode defining/storing the 
state may become complex. Cps is an easy and general way to solve the problem 
while keeping the whole thing reasonably readable. But do you maybe see another 
pattern that I don't ?

> The library looks very useful by the way: I have exactly the same issue with 
> several
> Lwt-only protocol libraries we're developing at the moment. Would love to use 
> yours before
> the first release of them to make them more independent of the underlying I/O 
> mechanism...


That would be nice, I'm glad if you can somehow reuse the pattern.


Best,

Daniel

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