[Xcb] Porting XCB to win32 - anyone interested?

[Ian Osgood]

On Mar 23, 2008, at 1:22 PM, Jeetu Golani wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I'm looking to take on the task of porting XCB to win32.
>
> As mentioned in a previous thread, I need the ability to write X  
> clients
> within windows (no Cygwin) and my quest brought me to the door of  
> XCB. I
> think it's a nice and concise library and I'd like to have it  
> running native
> in Win32.
>
> I think the network transport layer would probably need the most  
> work - the
> Scatter/Gather IO mechanism definitely needs work.

A bigger issue is that Windows sockets are not file handles, and have  
their own API. (The WSA API does have scatter/gather: see http:// 
msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms740138(VS.85).aspx)

The more common case of local server connections ("Unix sockets")  
would want to use a lighter-weight transport mechanism, like named  
pipes (which are file handles). You could at least write your own  
implementation of writev() implemented on top of write. It might also  
be worth investigating the Asynchronous I/O calls in the Win32 API.

> The pthreads library would
> also need work I suppose, though I haven't reached that far into my
> understanding of the code.

See Vincent's answer about pthreads-win32.

> That said, I'm by no ways an expert on X programming, nor do I  
> understand the
> XCB code completely :)....therefore if there're other people in the  
> community
> that are interested in helping out, I'd appreciate it :).....pls  
> write in to
> me :)
>
> Bye for now
>