Hi,

Is there anything in the standard library to do named pipes IPC in both windows and linux ? I am not necessarily looking for a unified API, anything that will allow me to setup named pipes on either OS and read/write on them will do.

Thanks,
Tarun

Tarun Ramakrishna wrote:
>Hi,
>
>Is there anything in the standard library to do named pipes IPC in both windows and linux ? I am not necessarily looking for a unified API, anything that will allow me to setup named pipes on either OS and read/write on them will do.
>
>Thanks,
>Tarun

I'm not sure but I think there's nothing like that in the standard
library. The only thing I can think of is that the new std.process
(https://github.com/kyllingstad/phobos/blob/new-std-process/std/process.d)
uses pipes for IPC (anonymous pipes though, not named pipes) :-(

at least for posix druntime exports the c api, so you could write a
wrapper for that. (The pipe functions and types are in
core.sys.posix.sys.stat.d (mknod, S_IFIFO))

-- 
Johannes Pfau

Hi Johannes,

Thanks! I located mkfifo in 'core.sys.posix.sys.stat'. I couldn't find anything for named pipes in the standard library, but there is a Windows API project in dsource and the module 'win32.winbase' has declarations for 'CreateNamedPipe', etc. I guess this will do.

Best Regards,
Tarun


On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 3:00 AM, Johannes Pfau <spam@example.com> wrote:
> Tarun Ramakrishna wrote:
>>Hi,
>>
>>Is there anything in the standard library to do named pipes IPC in both windows and linux ? I am not necessarily looking for a unified API, anything that will allow me to setup named pipes on either OS and read/write on them will do.
>>
>>Thanks,
>>Tarun
>
> I'm not sure but I think there's nothing like that in the standard library. The only thing I can think of is that the new std.process (https://github.com/kyllingstad/phobos/blob/new-std-process/std/process.d) uses pipes for IPC (anonymous pipes though, not named pipes) :-(
>
> at least for posix druntime exports the c api, so you could write a
> wrapper for that. (The pipe functions and types are in
> core.sys.posix.sys.stat.d (mknod, S_IFIFO))
>
> --
> Johannes Pfau
>

On Sun, 27 Feb 2011 13:53:05 -0500, Tarun Ramakrishna <lenkite@gmail.com> wrote:

> Is there anything in the standard library to do named pipes IPC in
> both windows and linux ? I am not necessarily looking for a unified
> API, anything that will allow me to setup named pipes on either OS and
> read/write on them will do.

Any C functions (including system calls) are available.  You are free to write your own API, and maybe it will be included in Phobos!

-Steve

Hi Steven,

Yes, I have now understood that.

Is there a guidelines/best practices page somewhere that describes how should a good library be coded for acceptance into the standard library:  patterns and conventions, etc ? I am very new to D, but from the mails I have read on this list so far, I have learnt that all the devs here prefer that a library API should preferably take power of D ranges, slices and generics. But what about other things ?

Thanks,
Tarun

On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 6:19 PM, Steven Schveighoffer <schveiguy@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 27 Feb 2011 13:53:05 -0500, Tarun Ramakrishna <lenkite@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Is there anything in the standard library to do named pipes IPC in both windows and linux ? I am not necessarily looking for a unified API, anything that will allow me to setup named pipes on either OS and read/write on them will do.
>
> Any C functions (including system calls) are available.  You are free to write your own API, and maybe it will be included in Phobos!
>
> -Steve
>

On Mon, 28 Feb 2011 08:00:28 -0500, Tarun Ramakrishna <lenkite@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Steven,
>
> Yes, I have now understood that.
>
> Is there a guidelines/best practices page somewhere that describes how
> should a good library be coded for acceptance into the standard
> library:  patterns and conventions, etc ? I am very new to D, but from
> the mails I have read on this list so far, I have learnt that all the
> devs here prefer that a library API should preferably take power of D
> ranges, slices and generics. But what about other things ?

There is an issue with Windows system calls that is difficult to solve.  D uses the DMC runtime, not the MSVC runtime.  This means when you call C library functions (e.g. printf, fopen), it uses DMC's C library.  The library has very poor support for converting to/from OS handles from things like FILE *.

This wouldn't be such a problem, except Phobos' I/O API is based on FILE *.  This means any system calls you make (such as CreateNamedPipe) which return a HANDLE will be near impossible to wrap into a FILE *.  In writing std.process, I had to write my own converters between FILE * and HANDLE, and when that code is available, you should be able to use it (expect to have it done by the next release of dmd).

But for now, I would concentrate on getting it to work for your code.  One thing to keep in mind is that any library to be accepted into Phobos *should* be cross-platform if possible.  I would think named pipes should be able to be a cross-platform library.

-Steve