The API is not unified because some platforms (notably, Windows) do not allow for unification of the various types. There were problems with doing a select() type of operation on files, iirc (tho you could with pipes and sockets). For basic read/write, unification is no problem. I don't think you can unify the creation, and certainly not the type-specific APIs.
Having N entry points version N enum variatns is no big deal. I would prefer the N functions instead of a parameterized function. Note that you cannot open "stdout" on Windows unless you use the special function. readv makes sense, as it is easy to simulate if the platform does not have it. Cheers, -g On 6/25/06, david reid <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I've done some work over last 24 hours and have an outline of abstracting the io functions. The aim is to remove the distinction between files, socket and pipes - replacing them with a single apr_io_t type. The exercise of figure out how it should work certainly opened my eyes to how complex we've made the whole thing! I've simply added the new code at present, but in order to gain much we'd need to ditch the older code, hence it's really a change for 2.x and beyond. So far I have basic creation and closing working, but now the architecture is in place getting read/write working shouldn't be hard. There's also a small test app to make sure it's all working as expected. Providing the same level of access we have at present isn't as easy as it looks, and finding a simple api that covers everything may well be impossible, but I'm hopeful we can cover most things under a nice simple api. Exactly how much the perf will be hurt by the changes - I'm not sure at present but may know once I have read/write working. A few things have cropped up though that I'm not really sure about. Why don't we have readv? Why don't we just have a "flagged" version of the functions to open stdxxx? Having both seems a touch silly and dramatic overkill. Unless people scream about this not being the right direction to go I'll try and find some time to progress the work a little more over the next few days. david
-- Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
