So here I am, sitting at my PC last night trying to port Luke's ftp client to Win32. It uses a lot of Unixisms, including signals (to emulate overlapped I/O and to do basic threading), pipes (popen), fork, termios/termcap, lots of directory stuff, and arpa/* and inet/* and so on.

So here I am working with MS's C runtime (CRT) which sucks just so bad. select() is essentially broken (64 file descriptors, anyone?), pipes don't exist, signals don't exist (and no way to really trap them), termios/termcap doesn't exist, fork doesn't work the way you'd expect, and unless it's in the Standard C library, there's no arpa/* or inet/*.

Coupled with that, the Visual C++ compiler ignores

#if 0

blah blah blah

#endif

and attempts to pre-process stuff it is supposed to ignore. So I'm basically hacking away code, so there's no chance of keeping this from being anything but a complete fork.

I don't want to use cygwin or gcc for win32 as I'm aiming for a high performance port.

So, I basically look at the guts of Luke's program. It's about 2000 lines of Crufty C code. I'm thinking that a new port, with just the guts of Luke's code will the way forward.

This allows me to use overlapped I/O (which is a fancy way of saying "asynchronous" I/O). NT reads blocks < 8 kb in blocking mode regardless of overlapped or not, and that works out okay anyway as we want to chuff it down a (slower) network socket. So I only am considering overlapped I/O for the network side. This has a greater chance of being able to work on the 9x kernel (which I care about >< this much). On platforms that do not support overlapped I/O (most Unixes), this can be changed back to be blocking network I/O and just put back in the signal handlers to perform cleanups and rate limiting.

It also allows me to rejig the old code that is truly crufty, and if I keep presentation, MI transport and MD transport (ipv4/nt ipv4/unix ipv6/nt ipv6/unix) seperate, the result will be a portable, probably smaller, definitely more robust client.

shootings

How many more kids have to die before the US takes action on small arms in the community?

Two separate school shootings today so far, luckily the one in the US didn't kill the person shot in the head, but the one in Brazil did. But being shot in the head is not fun, and I bet that person will be scarred for life, both emotionally and physically.

This tragedy must stop NOW!