On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 06:02:15AM -0800, Brian Maher <[email protected]> wrote: > > They are non-blocking when the underlying fd is non-blocking, they are > > never asynchronous. > > What is the difference between non-blocking and asynchronous?
Non-blocking simply means that the OS will not wait for more data when it doesn't know whether there will be some or not (or waiting for data to be transferred), and asynchronous means data will be transferred in parallel to your program. > thought these words where synonyms, and wikipedia seems to think so > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_I/O I am always at a loss of words when somebody uses wikipedia as if it were an argument. Even the discussion page points out that it is all wrong... There is nothing asynchronous about calling a function and waiting for it to return with data (read, send). There are asynchronous functions, too (aio_*), and claiming that they are all asynchronous is not really useful. -- The choice of a Deliantra, the free code+content MORPG -----==- _GNU_ http://www.deliantra.net ----==-- _ generation ---==---(_)__ __ ____ __ Marc Lehmann --==---/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / [email protected] -=====/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\ _______________________________________________ libev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schmorp.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/libev
