Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
Hello Einar,
Friday, February 10, 2006, 2:09:08 AM, you wrote:
as i understand this idea, transformer implementing async i/o should
intercept vGetBuf/vPutBuf calls for the FDs, start the appropriate
type FD = Int
vGetBuf_async :: FD -> Ptr a -> Int -> IO Int
vPutBuf_async :: FD -> Ptr a -> Int -> IO Int
EK> Please don't fix FD = Int, this is not true on some systems,
EK> and when implementing efficient sockets one usually wants
EK> to hold more complex state.
the heart of the library is class Stream. both "File" and "Socket"
should implement this interface. just now i use plain "FD" to
represent files, but that is temporary solution - really file also
must carry additional information: filename, open mode, open/closed
state. This "File" will be an abstract datatype, what can be based not
on FD in other operating systems.
The same applies to the "Socket". it can be any type what carry enough
information to work with network i/o.
implementation of async i/o should have a form of Stream Transformer,
which intercepts only the vGetBuf/vPutBuf operations and pass other
operations as is:
I don't think async I/O is a stream transformer, fitting it into the
stream hierarchy seems artificial to me.
It is just another way of doing I/O directly to/from file descriptors.
If your basic operation to read from an FD is
readFD :: FD -> Int -> Ptr Word8 -> IO Int
then an async I/O layer simply provides you with the exact same
interface, but with an implementation that doesn't block other threads.
It is part of the file descriptor interface, not a stream transformer.
Also, you probably need
readNonBlockingFD :: FD -> Int -> Ptr Word8 -> IO Int
isReadyFD :: FD -> IO Bool
in fact, I think this should be the basic API, since you can implement
readFD in terms of it. (readNonBlockingFD always reads at least one
byte, blocking until some data is available). This is used to partially
fill an input buffer with the available data, for example.
One problem here is that in order to implement readNonBlockingFD on Unix
you have to put the FD into O_NONBLOCK mode, which due to misdesign of
the Unix API affects other users of the same file descriptor, including
other programs. GHC suffers from this problem.
Cheers,
Simon
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