> Then the only tricky bit is getting a wait-able Handle for each type of
> IO object. In some cases it may be necessary to have a helper thread
> doing blocking IO on the thing and "signaling" when it gets something.
Yep. For many types of devices or I/O, you can't wait on the handle
of the device, you have to associate an event handle with the individual
I/O request and wait on the per-request handle (as an example, if you
have several async I/O requests outstanding on the same handle, waiting
on the handle wouldn't do any good since you wouldn't know which request
the status was for). It all seems very confusing at first, but eventually
starts to make sense.
The challenge is probably getting both win32 I/O *and* PerlIO to make
sense in your head, then figuring out how to get them to make sense
together :-).
By the way, if you don't already know it, all the win32 documentation is
online and available to all at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library if you
look under the "platform SDK" links you can find all the information you
could ever need on win32 I/O (and lots of other stuff as well).
