Is there interest in a std.http?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 03:09:23PM +0100, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Tuesday, 20 November 2012 at 04:26:02 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
> wrote:
> >We sorely need a server expert on board with the time and
> >inclination to write a good server-side networking framework.
> 
> I agree with this but it really should be generic; working at
> probably the file descriptor level, so we can do whatever protocols
> along with files, pipes, ... and ideally, any kind of injected
> event. I'd really like it if we could run one event loop and be able
> to do keyboard/joystick input, timers, GUI, threads, etc., including
> third party libraries, as well as networking. (Combining two
> different event loops is a pain in the butt.)

The event loop itself should be a generic component in Phobos, not
specific to anything else. It should work at the file descriptor level,
perhaps even combining with signal handling (using the self-pipe trick),
and handle timers and scheduled events as well. Everything else should
be pluggable into this generic module.

I have written such things before in C/C++, but in D this will be much
easier to implement, thanks to delegates (which make writing event-loop
based programs so much less painful).

Having a standard event loop will make it much less painful to integrate
many components together in a seamless way. Combining two event loops,
as Adam says, is a royal pain in the neck. Making the generic event loop
a Phobos standard will eliminate this problem.


> I have an implementation in mind (I'd use select() because I don't
> know libev, but we should be able to change that without changing
> the interface)...

The interface should be generic enough that you don't have to worry
about whether select or poll (or whatever the windows equivalent is) is
used. I think it's a good idea to implement the select version first, as
that's generic across Posixes, whereas libev is Linux-specific IIRC.


T

-- 
2+2=4. 2*2=4. 2^2=4. Therefore, +, *, and ^ are the same operation.