Native timers are a much hairier thing to deal with than green timers due to the
interface that we would like to expose (both a blocking sleep() and a
channel-based interface). I ended up implementing timers in three different ways
for the various platforms that we supports.
In all three of the implementations, there is a worker thread which does send()s
on channels for timers. This worker thread is initialized once and then
communicated to in a platform-specific manner, but there's always a shared
channel available for sending messages to the worker thread.
* Windows - I decided to use windows kernel timer objects via
CreateWaitableTimer and SetWaitableTimer in order to provide sleeping
capabilities. The worker thread blocks via WaitForMultipleObjects where one of
the objects is an event that is used to wake up the helper thread (which then
drains the incoming message channel for requests).
* Linux/(Android?) - These have the ideal interface for implementing timers,
timerfd_create. Each timer corresponds to a timerfd, and the helper thread
uses epoll to wait for all active timers and then send() for the next one that
wakes up. The tricky part in this implementation is updating a timerfd, but
see the implementation for the fun details
* OSX/FreeBSD - These obviously don't have the windows APIs, and sadly don't
have the timerfd api available to them, so I have thrown together a solution
which uses select() plus a timeout in order to ad-hoc-ly implement a timer
solution for threads. The implementation is backed by a sorted array of timers
which need to fire. As I said, this is an ad-hoc solution which is certainly
not accurate timing-wise. I have done this implementation due to the lack of
other primitives to provide an implementation, and I've done it the best that
I could, but I'm sure that there's room for improvement.
I'm pretty happy with how these implementations turned out. In theory we could
drop the timerfd implementation and have linux use the select() + timeout
implementation, but it's so inaccurate that I would much rather continue to use
timerfd rather than my ad-hoc select() implementation.
The only change that I would make to the API in general is to have a generic
sleep() method on an IoFactory which doesn't require allocating a Timer object.
For everything but windows it's super-cheap to request a blocking sleep for a
set amount of time, and it's probably worth it to provide a sleep() which
doesn't do something like allocate a file descriptor on linux.
This routine is currently only used to clean up the timer helper thread in the
libnative implementation, but there are possibly other uses for this.
The documentation is clear that the procedures are *not* run with any task
context and hence have very little available to them. I also opted to disallow
at_exit inside of at_exit and just abort the process at that point.
I've started working on a patch for #7313 . So far I tried to replace C types in `src/libstd/unstable/*` and related files.
So far, I have two questions. Is there a convention for passing pointers around in `std` as Rust types? Sometimes pointers are passed around as `*c_char` (which seems to be an `*i8`), `*c_void` or `*u8`, which leads to a lot of casts. E.g: [`exchange_malloc`](https://github.com/fhahn/rust/compare/issue-7313-replace-c-types?expand=1#diff-39f44b8c3f4496abab854b3425ac1617R60) used to return a `*c_char` but the function in turn only calls `malloc_raw` which returns a `*c_void`.
Is there a specific reason for this?
The second question is about `CString` and related functions like `with_c_str`. At the moment these functions use `*c_char*`. Should I replace it with `*u8` or keep it, because it's an wrapper around classical C strings?
[On 2013-12-06, I wrote to the rust-dev mailing list](https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-December/007263.html):
> Subject: Let’s avoid having both foo() and foo_opt()
>
> We have some functions and methods such as [std::str::from_utf8](http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/master/std/str/fn.from_utf8.html) that may succeed and give a result, or fail when the input is invalid.
>
> 1. Sometimes we assume the input is valid and don’t want to deal with the error case. Task failure works nicely.
>
> 2. Sometimes we do want to do something different on invalid input, so returning an `Option<T>` works best.
>
> And so we end up with both `from_utf8` and `from_utf8`. This particular case is worse because we also have `from_utf8_owned` and `from_utf8_owned_opt`, to cover everything.
>
> Multiplying names like this is just not good design. I’d like to reduce this pattern.
>
> Getting behavior 1. when you have 2. is easy: just call `.unwrap()` on the Option. I think we should rename every `foo_opt()` function or method to just `foo`, remove the old `foo()` behavior, and tell people (through documentation) to use `foo().unwrap()` if they want it back?
>
> The downsides are that unwrap is more verbose and gives less helpful error messages on task failure. But I think it’s worth it.
The email discussion has gone around long enough. Let’s discuss a concrete proposal. For the following functions or methods, I removed `foo` (that caused task failure) and renamed `foo_opt` (that returns `Option`) to just `foo`.
Vector methods:
* `get_opt` (rename only, `get` did not exist as it would have been just `[]`)
* `head_opt`
* `last_opt`
* `pop_opt`
* `shift_opt`
* `remove_opt`
`std::path::BytesContainer` method:
* `container_as_str_opt`
`std::str` functions:
* `from_utf8_opt`
* `from_utf8_owned_opt` (also remove the now unused `not_utf8` condition)
Is there something else that should recieve the same treatement?
I did not rename `recv_opt` on channels based on @brson’s [feedback](https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-December/007270.html).
Feel free to pick only some of these commits.
To build for the cortex-M series ARM processors LLC needs to be told to build for the thumb instruction set. There are two ways to do this, either with the triple "thumb\*-\*-\*" or with -march=thumb (which just overrides the triple anyway). I chose the first way.
The following will fail because the local cc doesn't know what to do with -mthumb.
````
rustc test.rs --lib --target thumb-linux-eab
error: linking with `cc` failed: exit code: 1
note: cc: error: unrecognized command line option ‘-mthumb’
````
Changing the linker works as expected.
````
rustc test.rs --lib --target thumb-linux-eabi --linker arm-none-eabi-gcc
````
Ideally I'd have the triple thumb-none-eabi, but adding a new OS looks like much more work (and I'm not familiar enough with what it does to know if it is needed).
* Stop using hardcoded numbers that have to all get updated when something changes (inevitable errors and rebase conflicts) as well as removes some unneeded -Z options (obsoleted over time).
* Remove `std::rt::borrowck`
The included test case would essentially never finish compiling without this
patch. It recursies twice at every ExprParen meaning that the branching factor
is 2^n
The included test case will take so long to parse on the old compiler that it'll
surely never let this crop up again.
I wrote a chapter for the FFI tutorial that describes how to perform callbacks from C code to Rust and gives some hints about what to consider and synchronization.
I just needed that for my own wrapper and thought it would be helpful for others.
The included test case would essentially never finish compiling without this
patch. It recursies twice at every ExprParen meaning that the branching factor
is 2^n
The included test case will take so long to parse on the old compiler that it'll
surely never let this crop up again.
