3 ms·

Care to explain why async disk IO is horrible? AFAIK, the kernel APIs only deal with abstract handles and descriptors - they aren't written specifically for di

• kentonv 11y ago
  On Unix, the APIs for async disk I/O are completely different from the APIs for async network I/O. This is because, on Unix, the APIs for network I/O are "readiness"-based (they tell you when data is available in the read buffer or space is available in the write buffer), but a disk file handle is always ready (except at EOF). So, for disk I/O you need a "completion" model, where you queue an operation and then get a callback when it is done. This is a very different kind of API, and as a result it does not fit well with the network I/O APIs, but of course if you are doing async you probably need to do both disk and network at the same time, so you need the APIs to play nice with each other (you need a single event loop that waits for both kinds of events). (On Windows, as I understand it, you can do completion-based I/O on all handle types.) And then, even if you manage to use async disk I/O, you can only really use it for reads and writes. Filesystem calls that manipulate the directory tree usually don't have async versions. At some point you have to give up and do things in threads.