[Haskell-cafe] [ANN] I/O library for Windows

[Andrew Coppin]

Felix Martini wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> winio is an I/O library for Windows using Windows API functions and
> has I/O completion port support. The main goal of this library is to
> support Simon Marlow's new Handle API once he has added that to GHC.
> The library also has a compatibility module for socket functions from
> the network-bytestring package. Because the library uses IOCP instead
> of select it is not limited to 1024 open sockets. Try for example the
> thread-ring program where each Haskell thread passes a UDP message
> around (Change the MaxUserPort field in
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
> to 65534 to enable all ports).
>
> The winio package is available on Hackage. Notice that it uses a
> development version of the network package which is available at
> http://darcs.haskell.org/packages/network/. The library has not been
> tested much and should be considered experimental so please try it if
> you use Windows and notify me of any issue or corner case.
>   

As I understand it, programs compiled with GHC currently use MSYS for 
all I/O operations, resulting in all kinds of strange behaviour in 
corner cases. (E.g., if you use System.Directory and ask whether "C:\\" 
is a directory, it says no, yet you can read the contents of that 
directory.) I would have thought that calling the Win32 API directly 
would probably fix most of these minor glitches. Is that what this 
package is intending to do?