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Using Windows API – Understanding OS-Backed Event Queues, System Calls, and Cross-Platform Abstractions
On Windows, things work a bit differently. While UNIX models almost everything as “files” you interact with, Windows uses other abstractions. On Windows, you get a handle that represents some object you can interact with in specific ways depending on exactly what kind of handle you have. We will use the same main function as…
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CALLING CONVENTION – Understanding OS-Backed Event Queues, System Calls, and Cross-Platform Abstractions
This is the first time we’ve encountered this term, so I’ll go over a brief explanation, even though we dive deeper into this topic later in the book. A calling convention defines how function calls are performed and will, amongst other things, specify: – How arguments are passed into the function – What registers the…
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Cross-platform event queues – Understanding OS-Backed Event Queues, System Calls, and Cross-Platform Abstractions
When creating a cross-platform event queue, you have to deal with the fact that you have to create one unified API that’s the same whether it’s used on Windows (IOCP), macOS (kqueue), or Linux (epoll). The most obvious difference is that IOCP is completion-based while kqueue and epoll are readiness-based. This fundamental difference means that…
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Completion-based event queues – Understanding OS-Backed Event Queues, System Calls, and Cross-Platform Abstractions
IOCP stands for input/output completion port. This is a completion-based event queue. This type of queue notifies you when events are completed. An example of this is when data has been read into a buffer. The following is a basic breakdown of what happens in this type of event queue: Figure 3.2 – A simplified…
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Event queuing via epoll/kqueue and IOCP – Understanding OS-Backed Event Queues, System Calls, and Cross-Platform Abstractions
This is a sort of hybrid of the previous approaches. In the case of a network call, the call itself will be non-blocking. However, instead of polling the handle regularly, we can add that handle to an event queue, and we can do that with thousands of handles with very little overhead. As programmers, we…
