On Tue, Dec 09, 2014 at 09:13:02AM -0500, Karl Dahlke wrote:
> > Pipes, sockets or message queues would be the three I'd think of here.
> 
> Right. Probably pipes cause it's easy, but it mostly doesn't matter
> and could be easily changed one to another.

Right, when I did this last time I landed on message queues eventually since the interface was a bit nicer to use (you put a message in, you get a message out, no need to worry about reading the correct amount etc), but I don't really mind any of the three.
> 
> > how would this play with blocking calls,
> 
> All three of these, and any others you might think of,
> block by default, and can also be set nonblocking,
> but I've learned over the years nonblocking is a bad idea.
> Never make a nonblocking call.
> My jupiter speech adapter for example - reads index markers
> coming back from the synthesizer asynchronously, and your keyboard commands,
> perhaps telling speech to shut up, and maybe speech
> commands coming from other processes through the fifo /etc/jupiter.fifo.
> Three asynchronous streams to monitor simultaneously,
> and the right way to do this is by calling select.
> In other words, if a primary process is monitoring many asynchronous
> events from other processes / streams, select() is your friend.
> It does exactly what you want.
> This is deep in the kernel, and thank god they put it there,
> because you just can't simulate it through any kind of user space programming.
> Anyways, I believe we will be able to migrate to various asynchronous events,
> ajax, download to disk in background, etc etc, when the time comes.

Agreed (though on a scalability note, as we're on linux anyway,
I'd go for epoll over select, but select is more portable,
and with 3 descriptors there's no noticeable, or probably measurable,
performance difference).

> I will see if I can bang this first step out,
> partly because I haven't programmed in about a year,
> and I find that I really miss it.
> When you're not programming for your boss / professor, it really is fun.
> I estimate a couple of weeks.

Sounds good.

> Meantime you (plural) might look at v8 and just evaluate.
> I still haven't gotten a hello world program to compile,
> and honestly that concerns me.

Yeah, that does sound rather concerning.
When I've got a bit of time (this weekend may be) I'll have a look at the Debian packaged version and see how far I get.
I'm also investigating if there are any other js engines which are in a
suitable state for use in a web browser.
I've got no solid candidates yet but I've got a couple of ideas.

Cheers,
Adam.