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eventsnode.jsioblockingnonblocking

non-blocking(event driven I/O) vs. blocking I/O

Recently I stumbled across this pretty slick JS library called nodeJS that acts like a server side JS.

The main feature of the language being Evented I/O which gives the inherent capacity of I/O being completely non-blocking using callbacks!!!

My question is, if this kind of completely non-blocking I/O mechanism existed in the past (given event driven I/O has been around for a long time), why aren't they more popular in high level languages like C# and Java (although Java has NIO implementation that supports non-blocking I/O)?

Currently, a simple file read/write operation results in complete I/O blocking which is not the case with event driven I/O.

I'd like to gain a better understanding of event driven I/O and how it is different from what we have in Java.

Solution

  • Java: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_I/O

    A multiplexed, non-blocking I/O facility for writing scalable servers

    .NET: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dxkwh6zw.aspx

    public IAsyncResult BeginReceive(
    byte[] buffer,
    int offset,
    int size,
    SocketFlags socketFlags,
    AsyncCallback callback,
    Object state
)