Very neat! Although after using C#'s TAP, callbacks sound like hell :)
Callbacks can be avoided using co-routines. I started a project that uses asynchronous sockets but they appear synchronous. With a bit of abstraction, it's really easy to develop network applications even in C: https://github.com/reginaldl/librinoo
Dyad: Minimal, portable async networking library for C
21–30 of 47 posts
Re: Dyad: Minimal, portable async networking library for C
#22Very neat! Although after using C#'s TAP, callbacks sound like hell :)
Callbacks can be avoided using co-routines. I started a project that uses asynchronous sockets but they appear synchronous. With a bit of abstraction, it's really easy to develop network applications even in C: https://github.com/reginaldl/librinoo
I wrote my own user-space-threading library called libwire. Mostly for not liking the malloc-everywhere approach so common everywhere. The tradeoffs are different and the code is more verbose at times but I like the fact that there are no mallocs in code, at least not very explicit ones. I do provided a memory pool so it allocates memory but it is bounded in size.
libwire: https://github.com/baruch/libwire
list of coroutine/user-space-threading libraries: https://github.com/baruch/libwire/wiki/Other-coroutine-libra...
Re: Dyad: Minimal, portable async networking library for C
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are you supposed to do socket programming without select?
poll is fairly portable, but still has scaling problems. To get beyond scaling problems, you usually need something OS-specific, such as epoll (Linux), kqueue (BSDs of some kind), etc. One of the things I'd expect of a cross-platform networking library would be to use the best available abstraction, especially on major platforms such as linux, and perhaps fall back to select on odd platforms. Of course, your docs nee…
Re: Dyad: Minimal, portable async networking library for C
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Callbacks can be avoided using co-routines. I started a project that uses asynchronous sockets but they appear synchronous. With a bit of abstraction, it's really easy to develop network applications even in C: https://github.com/reginaldl/librinoo
Your approach looks very interesting - the examples are definitely much easier to read and understand over most async C code I have seen. How does it work internally?
It's a very neat concept that allows for cleaner code (sequential rather than callback-hell) and use one or a few threads for many actions but without the overhead of thread-per-socket.
Re: Dyad: Minimal, portable async networking library for C
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Callbacks can be avoided using co-routines. I started a project that uses asynchronous sockets but they appear synchronous. With a bit of abstraction, it's really easy to develop network applications even in C: https://github.com/reginaldl/librinoo
Your approach looks very interesting - the examples are definitely much easier to read and understand over most async C code I have seen. How does it work internally?
Once the stack allocated for a thread, context switches are almost as cheap as a function call.
RiNOO has an event driven scheduler, based on epoll, which resume/release these user-space threads (that I call tasks) according to pending IOs. The library provides with IO functions (read, write...) which use the RiNOO scheduler.
As a bonus, real threading is quite easy: just need to run a scheduler per thread (see examples with multi-threading).
Re: Dyad: Minimal, portable async networking library for C
#26Re: Dyad: Minimal, portable async networking library for C
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your approach looks very interesting - the examples are definitely much easier to read and understand over most async C code I have seen. How does it work internally?
It uses "user-space threads" similar to ucontext (swapcontext(3)). I have my own version: https://github.com/reginaldl/fcontext Once the stack allocated for a thread, context switches are almost as cheap as a function call. RiNOO has an event driven scheduler, based on epoll, which resume/release these user-space threads (that I call tasks) according to pending IOs. The library provides with IO functions (read, write…
Re: Dyad: Minimal, portable async networking library for C
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your approach looks very interesting - the examples are definitely much easier to read and understand over most async C code I have seen. How does it work internally?
All of the different coroutine/user-space-threads work by switching the stack and the the instruction pointer when the code is about to block on an async system call. So one would find that to read from the socket would block (by getting EWOULDBLOCK in errno) register to wait for this fd to become readable and switch to another coroutine. There is always one coroutine that gets scheduled from time to time and users s…
Re: Dyad: Minimal, portable async networking library for C
#29does not seem like it supports ssl socket..or did i miss it ?
Re: Dyad: Minimal, portable async networking library for C
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of the different coroutine/user-space-threads work by switching the stack and the the instruction pointer when the code is about to block on an async system call. So one would find that to read from the socket would block (by getting EWOULDBLOCK in errno) register to wait for this fd to become readable and switch to another coroutine. There is always one coroutine that gets scheduled from time to time and users s…
Isn't it effectively thread-per-socket except that the switches now only happen on an async system call? The difference, I guess, is you can optimize the context switch to be very small (and have smaller thread stacks) at the cost of giving up pre-emptive switching.
There are also some hidden gains in terms of TLB caches and other costs of kernel threads switching.
An additional advantage is that between user-space-threads you have fewer locking problem since they implicitly lock out each other between context switch points so you only need locks when you need to protect an area across several context switch points.