Re: GPerlClosure and GIOChannel [patch and RFC]

[James Curbo <hannibal adtrw org>]

muppet wrote:
 > now, a new question is: should the GIOChannel be wrapped as a proper
> perl file handle (and how would you do that?) or is it okay to leave it 
> as a fileno?  and even more important, am i correct that we can just 
> ignore the GIOChannel at the perl level and use only the file 
> descriptor?  is there any GIOChannel functionality that perl doesn't 
> already provide?

Well, personally, in the one program I have written in C using 
GIOChannels, I didn't use them for unified IO access, I used them 
because you have to integrate your IO source (for me, sockets) into the 
event loop somehow.

So it goes like this, in C:
Create a socket (or another fd type) -> socket()
create a GIOChannel and tie the socket into it -> g_io_channel_unix_new
add the channel to the event loop -> g_io_add_watch
respond to events on the socket -> GIOFunc
read and write to the socket -> g_io_channel_read, g_io_channel_write

In the Perl case, I think it would be pretty cool to have the channel 
wrapped as a proper file handle, so that you could use all your normal 
Perl operations (from inside your IO callback, I assume).

So in perl you have:

create socket -> $sock = IO::Socket->new();
(no need for creationing a GIOChannel and tying it in...)
add channel to event loop ->
        Gtk2::Helper->add_watch($sock, 'in', \&GIOFunc, $data);
respond to events on the socket -> sub GIOFunc (from above)
read and write to the socket ->
        print $sock "hello world"; # for writing
        <> or read or sysread etc # for reading
	(instead of some $giochannel->read() stuff which is decidedly 		 
non-perlish)

Looking over the GIOChannel docs, I don't see anything that isn't 
provided by Perl already (Reading and writing by line and character, 
seeking, flushing, shutting down a channel, setting and unsetting 
buffering, getting/setting encoding (?), closing)


> please try out the patch and let me know what you think.

I'll try and play around with it this weekend sometime.

> --
> muppet <scott at asofyet dot org>

James