smol-rs
Support for Handles on Windows
Windows has two kinds file descriptors: Handle and Socket. It seems smol::Async currently only support Socket but not yet Handle, which is needed to abstract over APIs such as named pipes. What is the plan for Handle-based APIs in smol?
Similar to fds on UNIX this has the problem that not all Handles are waitable from what I understand, so that would have to be documented carefully. For all others, WaitForMultipleObjects() and friends would work.
IMHO this would be useful to have.
To add some more information here, this is not just named pipes but also for example: waitable timers (basically Windows' timerfd equivalent), event objects, semaphores, threads/processes, mutexes and probably various other things I forgot.
wepoll only seems to support SOCKET unfortunately, so might not be a good choice going forward unless it gets support for HANDLE.
I think we could eventually add support for RawHandle through IOCP... but it's not at the top of my priority list, tbh.
Makes sense and it's would only require internal changes anyway, not API-wise :)
To add some more information here, this is not just named pipes but also for example: waitable timers (basically Windows' timerfd equivalent), event objects, semaphores, threads/processes, mutexes and probably various other things I forgot.
This isn't really a deal-breaker, but I was looking to play with reading Physical Disks using OVERLAPPED_IO. Not anything (that) useful, just something for-fun that I could use to help learn how async-io works.
Unfortunately, because there's no support for Handles, I can't actually open a Physical Disk to pass to Async to take care of "all the stuff that I don't feel like writing myself" :P.
Usage as you describe is currently blocked on https://github.com/smol-rs/polling/issues/97. But, waitable handles like processes can be used in https://github.com/smol-rs/async-io/pull/152
