RE: [Help-smalltalk] RE: MinGW patch

[Akeroyd, FA \(Freddie\)]

> If you have time, could you improve win_recv so that it works for 
> sockets and pipes, as well as restoring support for the third set in 
> win_select? (Long term, it's probably just better to merge win_select 
> and win_recv into a Windows-specific implementation of poll, but for
now 
> let's keep your solution).

Socket support on windows may need a bit more work as descriptors
returned by socket() and fd's returned by open() can, in principle,
clash. In the Microsoft implementation of the Winsock API socket
descriptors are related to windows file handles and you can use
_open_osfhandle() and related functions to allocate a C RTL file
descriptor to work with. This would take care of keeping the numbers
unique, but I'm not sure if all of the usual CRTL functions work as
expected with these. We may need to keep a separate list of all socket
CRTL fd we generate and so lookup the fd later and treat sockets
differently on a read/write call etc. If we end up doing this lookup,
then it would be more general to create dummy fd's via e.g.
open("/dev/null") for our book keeping as we are not then relying on a
Microsoft implementation of the Winsock API.  

I was wondering if GNU Smalltalk preserves the identity of socket and
file descriptors inside its instances and so only calls recv()/send() on
sockets and read()/write() on CRTL file descriptors? If so that will
make life easier and we only need to handle poll() as you mention above.

Freddie