The new std.process is ready for review

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Sun, 24 Feb 2013 08:03:24 -0500, Jonas Drewsen <jdrewsen at nospam.com>  
wrote:

>
> 1, What about support for nonblocking wait(). It would be very nice not  
> to block the main thread if you really don't care about waiting for the  
> sub process but just want to be nice and not create zombies.

Non-blocking wait was brought up.  I think we can add it.  It would be  
non-blocking wait on specific processes though, I think doing a wait for  
*any* process is a more difficult problem to solve, and is not supported  
in the current std.process.  It may be something added later.

> 2, What about nonblocking read/writes or support for timing out  
> reads/writes at least. On linux you can select() on the file descriptor  
> but that is not supported on windows.

This is not an issue with std.process, but rather with File.  If File  
doesn't support non-blocking read/write, that is an issue, but we should  
solve it for all streams, not just pipes.

> I believe that support for nonblocking operation is important since  
> spawning external processes  is a common way to parallelize work and  
> std.concurrency could take advantage of this as well.

I agree, and would love to see File support non-blocking operations.

-Steve