async I/O

brnstnd at stealth.acf.nyu.edu brnstnd at stealth.acf.nyu.edu
Wed Jan 17 19:09:10 AEST 1990


I very much agree with Peter. The basic I/O calls should be asynchronous:
aread(), awrite(), and astatus(). aschedwait() and asyncwait() should wait
for scheduling and synchronization respectively; both should only be
special cases of a single await() call, with different semantics for
different devices and file types. Then my multitee program would be easy
to deal with, along with a host of related problems.

In article <CU318Y5xds13 at ficc.uu.net> peter at ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
> Secondly, I'm not suggesting that applications be forced to explicitly
> deal with asynchronism.

Exactly. read() and write() would be short library routines.

> I just believe that since the real world is
> asynchronous you should be able to deal with it.

Yup, and select() is only half a solution. (select() and poll() would be
forms of the more logically named await().)

---Dan



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