Re: [TCLCORE] TIP #458: Add Support for epoll() and kqueue() in the Notifier

[Gustaf N. <ne...@wu...>]

Dear all,

Is there a good reason for Tcl to support multiple native
event handling interfaces rather than moving towards an
abstraction library? A good candidate is libuv [1],
which is the hottest "successor" of libev due to its
windows support (IOCP) ... and probably due to its
usage in nde.js. libuv uses kqueue, (e)poll, IOCP,
eventfd, etc. where possible; .... and it is based on
a MIT-style license.

By using such a library, there is a hope to reduce the number
of separate source code variants and ifdefs in the Tcl code base
and reduce maintenance costs.

The biggest shortcoming of the current event handling
implementation in Tcl is the usage of select() with the
FD_SETSIZE of 1024; for most Tcl  applications there
won't be a noticeable performance difference by using
the more "modern" kernel interfaces,  which perform
only measurably better, when applications have thousands
of FDs open and/or performing character-wise notifications.
Addressing the shortcomings of select() is certainly worthwhile,
but the question is whether we want to test all these variants
on all platforms, with sometimes broken implementations
is some releases, or to delegate this to a specialized
library.

-g
[1] https://github.com/libuv/libuv

Am 05.12.16 um 02:14 schrieb Lucio Andrés Illanes Albornoz:
> I cannot test this code in any case as I do not have access to a Mac OS X
> installation. I'd therefore very much appreciate feedback from tcl-core Mac
> OS X users.
>