Re: Discouraging use of sync APIs

[Simon McVittie <simon mcvittie collabora co uk>]

On 11/02/15 21:10, Jasper St. Pierre wrote:
> Another example: for some odd reason, GLocalFileInputStream isn't a
> pollable output stream

(I assume you mean GLocalFileOutputStream.)

> Why was this done? I don't know.

AIUI, because all Unix kernels treat local I/O as arbitrarily fast, 
hence "local" files (which might in fact be NFS-mounted from another 
continent) are not usefully pollable.

You can usefully poll pipes, fifos, sockets, most recent-ish Linux APIs 
(e.g. inotify, epoll, timerfd, kdbus), and probably their equivalents on 
non-Linux. Notably, "regular files" are not on that list (and I don't 
think directories are either).

--
Simon McVittie
Collabora Ltd. <http://www.collabora.com/>