On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 6:39 AM, Ludovic Courtès <l...@gnu.org> wrote:
> Hello, > > I had a quick look at ‘wip-nio’, and here are initial comments. > > • epoll is Linux-specific. Any idea how a more multi-platform API > could be provided? I guess libevent could be used, but we don’t > want to add one more dependency in 2.0. How much is (ice-9 nio) > dependent on epoll vs. poll, for instance? > > Maybe add a module named "(ice-9 linux)"? And we may add more Linux-specific things. Also "(ice-9 bsd)" which provides "kqueue" or other interesting things. If users try to use BSD-specific modules under Linux, we may throw an exception. And functions like "under-bsd?" or "under-linux?" maybe helpful. Anyway, libevent for Guile is also a good idea. But I don't think libevent should integrate into Guile. We can write a standalone guile-libevent. • ‘nio’ doesn’t seem very descriptive to me; ‘nbio’ maybe? > In my server project, I named it "aio" since it's asynchronous. > > • I agree that it’s an important problem to address, and I like the > use of coroutines, and I like that it actually solves the problem > for some applications like the web server. > > However, I think the approach has shortcomings: (1) it doesn’t > accept other sources of events (timers, mouse clicks, etc.), and > (2) it doesn’t allow you to do something while waiting (of course, > other threads/waiters get scheduled, but the caller is just > waiting, so you can’t for instance update your progress bar while > waiting for your bytevector to arrive.) > > Functional reactive programming à la FrTime [0], and synchronous > reactive programming à la HipHop [1] seem to be much more generic > and expressive. It would be great if Guile would come with such a > framework eventually. It’s probably more work, though, so it > probably makes sense to have an alternative mechanism in the > meantime. > > WDYT? > > Thanks, > Ludo’. > > [0] http://www.cs.brown.edu/~greg/ > [1] http://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Gerard.Berry/Papers/plastic2.pdf > > > >
