Re: Port of Emacs client / server programs to Windows NT

[Neil Roberts]

On Sun, Oct 29, 2006 at 07:56:30PM -0500, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > The advantages of using named pipes instead of TCP are:
> 
> It has some disadvantages as well:
> 
> - They're specific to a non-free OS.

In a way, Windows named pipes are more like Unix domain sockets then
Unix named pipes (AKA FIFOs) because they disappear as soon as the
server process closes the pipe and so aren't proper file system
entries.

So instead of making 'local sockets do nothing on Windows because they
are not supported, it would seem to make sense to make it create named
pipes because they are as close to Unix domain sockets as there is in
Windows and they seem to be used as the equivalent.

> - TCP support is useful in its own right, to support remote
>   connections.

Granted that is true, so there would be no harm in leaving TCP support
and presumably implementing it for the Unix build as well. However as
the current default is to use named pipes and TCP sockets aren't even
implemented under the regular Unix version surely that implies that
the preferred solution is to use Unix domain sockets?

- Neil