[Xcb] Porting XCB to win32 - anyone interested?

Jeetu Golani jeetu.golani at gmail.com
Mon Mar 24 10:52:35 PDT 2008


Hi,

A quick question everyone with regards my aim to port XCB to win32. I've been 
reading up on I/O Mechanisms and I've come across "Overlapped I/O" in 
Windows. If my understanding is correct what we're using currently in XCB 
seems to be non-blocking asynchronous communication. My question is....which 
is better? doing the windows port would I be better off sticking with 
non-blocking i/o mechanisms or using the overlapped i/o mechanisms. I have to 
admit my relative unfamiliarity to this turf :)

Thanks.

Bye for now

On Monday 24 Mar 2008, Ian Osgood wrote:
> 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
>
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