[Haskell-cafe] Waiting on input with `hWaitForInput' or `threadWaitRead'

[Jason Dusek]

I would like to use evented I/O for a proxying application. My
present thinking is to fork a thread for each new connection and
then to wait for data on either socket in this thread, writing
to one or the other socket as needed.

There are two API functions I've found for waiting and they each
raise some questions:

  System.IO.hWaitForInput :: Handle -> Int -> IO Bool

    This function dovetails well with the high-level networking
    libraries but introduces difficulties because it decodes the
    stream to check for full characters. If the handle is set to
    binary mode, are decoding errors still a possibility?

  Control.Concurrent.threadWaitRead :: Fd -> IO ()

    This function would seem to be closer to the ideal in terms
    of performance and semantics: it just waits until there are
    bytes available. However, converting the handle produced by
    the high-level networking libraries to a file descriptor
    closes the handle (!). This makes some sense: plucking the
    descriptor out of a handle doubtless interacts with other
    users of that handle in an unsafe way. It seems I need to
    through a very different set of libraries, one based on file
    descriptors and not handles, to be able to use this
    function.

Ideally, I'd get something like select() on handles, just saying
whether there are bytes or not. However, I haven't managed to
find anything like that in the standard libraries.

--
Jason Dusek
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