[Haskell-cafe] Ann: Win32-notify 0.1

[David MacIver]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 5:22 PM, Bryan O'Sullivan <bos at serpentine.com> wrote:
> Niklas Broberg wrote:
>
>  > So API suggestions would be most welcome!
>
>  Your challenge will lie in finding an API that can be implemented
>  efficiently on all concerned platforms.  I don't know what the
>  characteristics of the Windows or OS X notification APIs are, but if you
>  use inotify on Linux, and you immediately issue a read every time select
>  tells you there's something to be read, you'll easily consume 70% of a
>  CPU when the filesystem gets busy.
>
>  With a little guile, you can reduce that overhead by two orders of
>  magnitude, to a fraction of a percent.  It's not all that easy to do
>  this well, but using inotify naively is so crippling that you must do
>  it.  Any higher-level API must account for factors like this.

Factor has a file system notification API that wraps windows, linux
and mac ones. It might be worth taking a look at that to see what it
does.