Re: [Pyobjc-dev] Re: FYI: Open Source Scripting Layer For Cocoa

[Just v. R. <ju...@le...>]

Bob Ippolito wrote:

> I've been meaning to develop a CFRunLoop reactor for Twisted for
> months now.  Basically, you would be replacing the select() mechanism
> with something that used CFRunLoop, CFSocket (can probably use the
> existing functionality and just have the CFSocket use the fileno from
> them), and CFTimer.  Unfortunately, not all of this stuff is wrapped
> in PyObjC or Python 2.3 yet so I'm expecting it to entail a fair
> amount of pain-in-the-ass C code with lots of structures and
> callbacks into Python (yay CFSocket).

I don't know anything about how twisted reactors work internally, but
since Cocoa has pretty decent support for async I/O, wouldn't it be an
option to use this instead of going all the way down to CFRunLoop? I'm
thinking of these NSFileHandle methods:

- acceptConnectionInBackgroundAndNotify 
- readInBackgroundAndNotify 
- readToEndOfFileInBackgroundAndNotify 
- waitForDataInBackgroundAndNotify 

and the notifications that go with them.

Using any of the above will actually cause a thread to be spawned, but
that's not visible from user code. I wonder though, does Cocoa spawn a
new thread for each NSFileHandle, or will it use _one_ (possibly
select-based) thread for all of them?

Just