[libdispatch-dev] Windows compatibility

[Robert N. M. Watson]

On 25 Sep 2009, at 21:44, Mark Heily wrote:

>> This is my intuition also: I think you'd want to have an entirely
>> independent implementation using native Windows primitives, and  
>> simply
>> give it the same (or similar) API on top.
>
> Has anyone considered using the Apache Portable Runtime (APR)? They  
> have many
> portable goodies including lock-free FIFO queues and thread pools. If
> libdispatch was rewritten to use APR instead of POSIX interfaces, it  
> should
> work fine on Windows.


Hi Mark--

This is an interesting idea. My first thought was to look at whether  
pthreads + libevent would provide a reasonable foundation for a  
libnqkqueue ("not quite kqueue") wrapper library implementing  
(roughly) the kqueue interface on non-supporting systems. There are  
some problems with this idea, not least that libevent can't provided a  
unified event source for some of the types of events supported by  
kqueue. On the other hand, it would offer significantly more  
portability (at the cost of less efficiency and fewer capabilities).  
I've not looked at apr yet, but maybe this would be a better  
portability foundation. I need to spend some time comparing semantics  
and capabilities of kqueue and libevent anyway, and I'll add apr to  
the mix.

Robert