Re: [Chicken-users] Reading from TCP sockets and time outs

[felix]

Kim wrote:
> Greetings --
>
> I am a fairly new user to Chicken, and I have been wrestling with a 
> problem that I have not yet managed to figure out soley within Chicken.
> I am started to suspect I may have to skip out through the FFI to solve
> it.
>
> What I would like to have are threads that can wait/block until one of
> three events happen:
>   1) time out
>   2) Data ready to be read on a (tcp) port/file descriptor
>   3) Another thread sends a message/signal to unblock the waiting thread
>
> Right now, what I am trying is to have the thread manually set a timeout
> with ##sys#thread-block-for-timeout! and the wait on the socket with
> ##sys#thread-block-for-i/o!, then calling (thread-yield!).  When
> the thread unblocks, I am using (file-select) to check to see if the
> socket had data to be read, otherwise I check for a time out.  
>
> This does not quite seem to be working.  Ideally, I would also like
> to be able to use (##sys#thread-unblock!) or something similiar to
> wake up a thread that is otherwise blocked on a time out or a socket.

Yes, the threading stuff in Chicken is more designed towards being
simple and SRFI-18 compliant, instead having a clean and general
API for doing blocking/unblocking. Currently a thread can either
block on timeout, on I/O or on termination of another thread.
Blocking for timeout can be combined with blocking for termination
(incidentally). messages (i.e. mailboxes) work by solely using
thread-suspend!/-resume!.

I will try to find a solution for this problem (blocking on TO, I/O and
messages). If you would have any ideas for a decent API, please tell.


cheers,
felix