Re: NSURL loading system

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 2007-12-17 14:25:49 +0000 Philippe Roussel <p.o.roussel@free.fr> 
wrote:

> One quick question : synchronous operations in NSURLHandle (and other
> classes if I remember correctly) use their asynchronous counterparts
> and a busy wait loop. Isn't it possible to read/write synchronously
> and 'select' on those operations instead ? Maybe it's too much work
> for too little benefit ?

In the base library everything works asynchronously via NSRunLoop to 
avoid having things block the process (or require threads to avoid 
blocking problems).  The NSRunLoop code uses the poll() system calls 
(or select() if poll is not available, or the mswindows equivalent 
call to wait for events), so it should never enter a busy wait loop.
Rewriting to use synchronous I/O  would require the use of threads, 
which would make the code rather less efficient (due to the need for 
locking) as well as harder to understand/debug because of thread 
interactions.