Mixing messages and socket operations

[Sean Kelly]

On Tuesday, 11 March 2014 at 14:44:51 UTC, Andre Kostur wrote:
> Hi, I'm trying a prototype project at work and have been trying 
> to find a good example of network programming in D.  What I'm 
> trying to do is have a separate thread to deal with the socket 
> (calls .accept() for example), but I'd also like the thread to 
> be responsive to the OwnerTerminated message coming from the 
> parent thread (the daemon is shutting down, time to orderly 
> tear down the threads).   However, .accept is blocking, as is 
> receive().  I'd rather not have to resort to polling each of 
> the two.  What's the community's standard approach to this 
> problem?

To make accept() non-blocking, you can wait on the accept socket
using select or poll.  When the socket becomes readable, you're
ready to listen.  Then you could set a timeout for the select
call and do a receiveTimeout(0).

Things get trickier if you don't like the busy wait approach
though.  You'd need to have a file descriptor signaled when a
message arrived or a message sent on a socket event (I'd favor
the former).  I can imagine sorting this out using the new
Scheduler stuff in std.concurrency, but an easier approach might
be to just use vibe.d, which integrates message passing and
socket events already.