Re: [Chicken-users] Async IO (was Re: libcurl?)

[Graham Fawcett]

On 10/4/05, Will M. Farr <address@hidden> wrote:
> I don't know what Twisted is, but you might have a look at Termite
> (mentioned in this blog
> http://patricklogan.blogspot.com/2005/07/termite-lisp-for-distributed-
> computing.html ); it sounds like what you're talking about done in
> Gambit-C.

Thanks, Will. I did see Logan's blog about Termite, and read the
presentation slides: very cool stuff.

The motivations are different. Termite's raison-d'etre seems to be
elegant, distributed computing. Twisted [1] is a networking framework
for building protocol handlers (and applications on top of them) based
on non-blocking I/O and a kernel ("reactor") that dispatches network
events to protocol/application handlers, which are composed using a
set of callback functions. Twisted's library includes protocol
implementations for HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, etc. There's no threading
overhead, and such a "monolithic, non-blocking" design can handle a
very large number of concurrent connections, usually scaling better
than a multithreaded architecture.

(As *yet* another aside, is anyone aware of/interested in SEDA (Staged
Event-Driven Architecture) [2]? If I were building Twisted-for-Scheme
from scratch, I'd probably take a hard look at the SEDA architecture
first. Just curious if this is on anyone's else's radar.)

Sorry for the non-Chicken talk. If I'm too off-topic, tell me to get
stuffed. ;-)

Graham

[1] http://twistedmatrix.com/

[2] M. Welsh, D. Culler, and E. Brewer. "SEDA: An Architecture for
Well-Conditioned, Scalable Internet Services." In Proc. SOSP-18, 2001.
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/welsh01seda.html