Named Pipes IPC in D for windows and linux ?

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2011 08:00:28 -0500, Tarun Ramakrishna <lenkite at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Steven,
>
> Yes, I have now understood that.
>
> Is there a guidelines/best practices page somewhere that describes how
> should a good library be coded for acceptance into the standard
> library:  patterns and conventions, etc ? I am very new to D, but from
> the mails I have read on this list so far, I have learnt that all the
> devs here prefer that a library API should preferably take power of D
> ranges, slices and generics. But what about other things ?

There is an issue with Windows system calls that is difficult to solve.  D  
uses the DMC runtime, not the MSVC runtime.  This means when you call C  
library functions (e.g. printf, fopen), it uses DMC's C library.  The  
library has very poor support for converting to/from OS handles from  
things like FILE *.

This wouldn't be such a problem, except Phobos' I/O API is based on FILE  
*.  This means any system calls you make (such as CreateNamedPipe) which  
return a HANDLE will be near impossible to wrap into a FILE *.  In writing  
std.process, I had to write my own converters between FILE * and HANDLE,  
and when that code is available, you should be able to use it (expect to  
have it done by the next release of dmd).

But for now, I would concentrate on getting it to work for your code.  One  
thing to keep in mind is that any library to be accepted into Phobos  
*should* be cross-platform if possible.  I would think named pipes should  
be able to be a cross-platform library.

-Steve