maria-developers team mailing list archive

[MARK CALLAGHAN <mdcallag@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 4:32 AM, Kristian Nielsen
<knielsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> MARK CALLAGHAN <mdcallag@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
>> Why does this need to save/restore thread contexts (setcontext, etc)?
>> I think that if the library is that hard to change then it should be
>> fixed or a simpler solution should be attempted.
>
> In general, when implementing non-blocking semantics like this, there are two
> main approaches:
>
> 1. Write the code in event-driven style. This means using some kind of state
>   machine or message passing (or both) rather than normal nested
>   calls. Whenever code needs to do I/O, or call another function that might
>   do I/O, the current state is manually saved to some struct and control
>   returns to the caller. When the I/O completes control must continue in the
>   next state of the state machine or handler of completion message.
>
> 2. Use co-routines (also called fibers or light-weight threads or
>   whatever). The code is written in normal style with nested calls. For
>   operations that need to do I/O, a co-routine is spawned to run the
>   operation; when waiting for I/O the co-routine is suspended, and resumed
>   again when I/O completes.
>
> The main reason I choose (2) is similar to what RethinkDB describe here:
>
>    http://blog.rethinkdb.com/improving-a-large-c-project-with-coroutines
>    http://blog.rethinkdb.com/making-coroutines-fast
>
> Basically, (1) is nice for writing quick IRC bots and the like, but as the
> complexity of the problem grows, the event-driven code becomes very hard to
> maintain and extend.
>
> For adding non-blocking to an existing library like libmysql, there is the
> added advantage that the change can be much less intrusive, as we can avoid
> re-writing parts of the existing code into event-driven style.

Why isn't it sufficient to do a sequence of non-blocking reads to
buffer enough data to produce a query result and then process the
received data? That doesn't require getcontext/setcontext.

-- 
Mark Callaghan
mdcallag@xxxxxxxxx