Thread overview
new std.process and "Win/DMC runtime issues"?
Jan 16, 2012
Nick Sabalausky
Jan 16, 2012
Nick Sabalausky
January 16, 2012
The limitations of the current std.process are getting to be a big pain in my ass for script-style programs. Last I heard, the new std.process was blocked by "issues with the DMC runtime prevent it from working on Windows".

What's up with that? Any news or any specifics? And more hopefully: Any workarounds to the windows issue so I could at least grab it and use it pre-acceptance-into-phobos?


January 16, 2012
On Mon, 16 Jan 2012 02:49:33 -0500, Nick Sabalausky <a@a.a> wrote:

> The limitations of the current std.process are getting to be a big pain in
> my ass for script-style programs. Last I heard, the new std.process was
> blocked by "issues with the DMC runtime prevent it from working on Windows".
>
> What's up with that? Any news or any specifics? And more hopefully: Any
> workarounds to the windows issue so I could at least grab it and use it
> pre-acceptance-into-phobos?

I had a pull request into dmc, Walter said that he would merge it after this past release of dmd.  I did not see any emails, but looking at dmc, it looks like it's updated!  Don't know why I missed that email, maybe I glossed over it...

But here's the kicker :)  Building DMC is impossible (partly because its closed source, and partly because it requires obscure tools you can no longer obtain).

So we still have to wait for a release of DMC (or for D's version of snn.lib to be updated to include the fix).

Specifically, the issue is with pipes and EOF.  Since everything in D uses FILE *, so does the new std.process (not the best choice IMO, but we have no choices in this (yet) ).  But DMC's FILE * treats an EPIPE error as a EBADF, meaning the FILE* sets its error flag vs the EOF flag.

This means for instance, if you piped off a process to transform a file, and read it's stdout to completion, std.stdio.File would throw an exception.

The fix checks for the specific error and translates it to EOF.  It's somewhat of a hack, but it works.

If you are interested, I have a patched snn.lib with the fix in place if you want to try out the new version of std.process.  Send me an email.

-Steve
January 16, 2012
"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:op.v76pwcmseav7ka@localhost.localdomain...
> On Mon, 16 Jan 2012 02:49:33 -0500, Nick Sabalausky <a@a.a> wrote:
>
>> The limitations of the current std.process are getting to be a big pain
>> in
>> my ass for script-style programs. Last I heard, the new std.process was
>> blocked by "issues with the DMC runtime prevent it from working on
>> Windows".
>>
>> What's up with that? Any news or any specifics? And more hopefully: Any workarounds to the windows issue so I could at least grab it and use it pre-acceptance-into-phobos?
>
> I had a pull request into dmc, Walter said that he would merge it after this past release of dmd.  I did not see any emails, but looking at dmc, it looks like it's updated!  Don't know why I missed that email, maybe I glossed over it...
>
> But here's the kicker :)  Building DMC is impossible (partly because its closed source, and partly because it requires obscure tools you can no longer obtain).
>
> So we still have to wait for a release of DMC (or for D's version of snn.lib to be updated to include the fix).
>

Ahh, fantastic, so progress has been made, and it sounds like it's nearly ready :)

> Specifically, the issue is with pipes and EOF.  Since everything in D uses FILE *, so does the new std.process (not the best choice IMO, but we have no choices in this (yet) ).  But DMC's FILE * treats an EPIPE error as a EBADF, meaning the FILE* sets its error flag vs the EOF flag.
>
> This means for instance, if you piped off a process to transform a file, and read it's stdout to completion, std.stdio.File would throw an exception.
>
> The fix checks for the specific error and translates it to EOF.  It's somewhat of a hack, but it works.
>

Interesting, thanks.

> If you are interested, I have a patched snn.lib with the fix in place if you want to try out the new version of std.process.  Send me an email.
>

Sent