[Haskell-cafe] Re: Hugsvs GHC (again)was: Re: Somerandomnewbiequestions

[Keean Schupke]

Udo Stenzel wrote:

>The Glibc documentation says, "select determines if there is data available 
>(more precisely, if a call to read(2) will not block)."  I think, this is reasonably
>precise.  The OS does know, where you are going to read (at the file pointer)
>and if you seek() or pread() instead, well, that is no call to read(2) and may
>change everything.
>
>Thus the question is, does select() reliably tell if read() would block or does it
>check for something else?  Is the documentation wrong (on some platforms)?
>  
>
Having read around I have found that select does return readable for all
file IO on a block device...

I wonder if ghc could use non-blocking mode (files opened with the 
O_NONBLOCK)
flag? In which case you just do the read, and it returns immediately 
with the current
contents of the buffer (up to the size in the read argument)... The 
sheduler could
allow one chance at reading, then give the other haskell-threads a go 
whilst more
data comes in.

    Keean.