[tech] Mac stuff

[David Luyer]

Note: This message is primarily about Unix programming, so please ignore
the
subject line :-)

Andrew Bailey writes:

>[0] its a personal peeve of mine if I have to grep the source dir to
find out
>the type of a variable. Like it sucks, pass your vars people please.

I have no problem passing variables, I just find that I often end up
having to
pass them via a void * to do it cleanly -- although I guess then you
still have
a clear typecast back inside the function when you operate that way as
you have
to case the void * to something to use it.

int handler(int fd, void *data);
int timeout_handler(void *data);

add_handler(&(struct pollfd){0, POLLIN, 0}, handler, data);
add_event(&(struct timeval){5, 0}, timeout_handler, data);

Yes:
  1.  squid has changed the way I code, although it's for the better IMO
- my
      code is generally far faster than fork()ing code, and I have taken
      fork()ing servers and achieved insane speedups by applying the
squid
      model (parameterizing the data, and using a poll() or select()
based
      central loop)...
  2.  that's not valid C (unless C has become smarter since I last
looked :-))
  3.  add_handler is required to coalesce different events, and handler
has
      to know what kind of event it's handling

The first thing to learn about Unix programming: fork() is good.
The second thing to learn about Unix programming: fork() is evil.

(and threading vs poll()/select()... both add complexity, you could
argue for
years about the winner, IMO squid+diskd shows who the winner is:
poll()/select()
but with an extra process per disk to hand off blocking disk IO to over
shared
memory ... beats squid asyncio - poll()/select() with threads to hand
off disk
IO ... and beats all "pure" threading attempts at the same problem that
I've
seen to date)

David.