Module mio::windows

Windows-only extensions to the mio crate.

Mio on windows is currently implemented with IOCP for a high-performance implementation of asynchronous I/O. Mio then provides TCP and UDP as sample bindings for the system to connect networking types to asynchronous I/O. On Unix this scheme is then also extensible to all other file descriptors with the EventedFd type, but on Windows no such analog is available. The purpose of this module, however, is to similarly provide a mechanism for foreign I/O types to get hooked up into the IOCP event loop.

This module provides two types for interfacing with a custom IOCP handle:

• Binding - this type is intended to govern binding with mio's Poll type. Each I/O object should contain an instance of Binding that's interfaced with for the implementation of the Evented trait. The register, reregister, and deregister methods for the Evented trait all have rough analogs with Binding.

  Note that this type does not handle readiness. That is, this type does not handle whether sockets are readable/writable/etc. It's intended that IOCP types will internally manage this state with a SetReadiness type from the poll module. The SetReadiness is typically lazily created on the first time that Evented::register is called and then stored in the I/O object.

  Also note that for types which represent streams of bytes the mio interface of readiness doesn't map directly to the Windows model of completion. This means that types will have to perform internal buffering to ensure that a readiness interface can be provided. For a sample implementation see the TCP/UDP modules in mio itself.

• Overlapped - this type is intended to be used as the concreate instances of the OVERLAPPED type that most win32 methods expect. It's crucial, for safety, that all asynchronous operations are initiated with an instance of Overlapped and not another instantiation of OVERLAPPED.

  Mio's Overlapped type is created with a function pointer that receives a OVERLAPPED_ENTRY type when called. This OVERLAPPED_ENTRY type is defined in the winapi crate. Whenever a completion is posted to an IOCP object the OVERLAPPED that was signaled will be interpreted as Overlapped in the mio crate and this function pointer will be invoked. Through this function pointer, and through the OVERLAPPED pointer, implementations can handle management of I/O events.

When put together these two types enable custom Windows handles to be registered with mio's event loops. The Binding type is used to associate handles and the Overlapped type is used to execute I/O operations. When the I/O operations are completed a custom function pointer is called which typically modifies a SetReadiness set by Evented methods which will get later hooked into the mio event loop.

Structs

Binding	A Binding is embedded in all I/O objects associated with a Poll object.
Overlapped	A wrapper around an internal instance over miow::Overlapped which is in turn a wrapper around the Windows type OVERLAPPED.