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1 point by almkglor 6038 days ago | link | parent

> Well, there is a Boost library for cross-platform threading. We could just use that and "simulated" async using threads to offload the synchronous io.

Boost also has asio, but it appears to be concentrated more on socket I/O than I/O in general.

What I would like is to have a general-purpose asynchronous I/O library, which would handle all details of asynchronicity.

Basically, I intend to allow SNAP to be compiled in two modes:

1. Single worker thread, multiple process. For cases where the OS doesn't have decent threads (dorky embedded systems? LOL, quite a few of the embedded systems I've seen recently actually have decent threads)

2. Multiple worker OS-level threads, single runqueue.

async I/O is needed for 1, and would be nice for 2: in case 2, if a worker thread blocks on synchronous I/O, the others will still fetch processes to run from the runqueue, although the blocked worker thread is one less thread that can work.

However in case 1, there's just one thread, so it can't block.