libasync 0.7.0

About

The libasync asynchronous library (beta) is written completely in D, features a cross-platform event loop and enhanced connectivity and concurrency facilities for extremely lightweight asynchronous tasks. It embeds naturally to D projects (version >= 2.066.0), compiles statically with your project and has an open source license (MIT).

A fully functional, tested vibe.d driver is available in the latest version of vibe.d, you can enable it by appending "subConfigurations": { "vibe-d": "libasync"} in your project's dub.json configuration file.

The benchmarks on vibe.d / DMD relative to libevent show a 20% slower performance, although it is probable that compiling with LDC once it is available will result in better performances for libasync. This is a small price to pay for fewer external dependencies.

Features

The following capabilities are now being tested and should not be used in any circumstance in a production environment.

(*) Unit tests confirmed on Mac, Linux, Windows - Platforms used were Mac OS X (10.8, 10.9), Linux (Fedora 20) and Windows 32/64 bit, although it should be compatible to 99% of Desktop OS users.

(*) Compiles with DMD (versions 2.066.0, 2.066.1) and LDC v0.15 alpha1+ with LLVM 3.4

• Multi-threading support - EventLoop can be launched and run from an unlimited number of threads!

• Asynchronous TCP connection - handles multiple requests at a time in each individual thread

• Asynchronous TCP listener - delivers a new connection to the delegate of your choice

• File Operations - executes file read/write/append commands in a thread pool, notifies of completion in a handler

• DNS resolver - runs blocking DNS resolve operations in a thread pool, savings are the duration of a ping.

• File/Folder Watcher - watches directories for file changes (CREATE, DELETE, MODIFY, RENAME/MOVE)

• UDP connection - receives or sends packets from/to multiple peers

• Timer - sets a periodic or one-shot/periodic timer with high-precision (μs) to call a select delegate

• Signal - Wakes up the event loop in a foreign thread and passes a message to its delegate

• Notifier - Thread-local and lock-less adaptation of Signal which queues a message intended for a local delegate

Limitations

Some or all of these limitations are possibly being implemented currently and may be available in a future release.

• One EventLoop per thread - There is a hard limit of one event loop per thread
• Futures and Promises - Call chaining is not supported yet, however a vibe.d driver is available on my fork
• Manual error management - The entire library is nothrow and error management must be built on top of it.

Installation Instructions

• Download and install DMD 2.066.0+ from dlang.org
• Download and install dub 0.9.22 from code.dlang.org
• Use Git to clone this repository
• Run dub test to test the library on your operating system (submit any issue with a log report by uncommenting enum LOG = true in types.d)
• Add the library to your project by including it in the dependencies, using import libasync.all
• The recommended editor is MonoDevelop with Mono-D due to its Mixin Template resolver (must be enabled manually), with auto-completion and comment-resolved summary tooltips.
• You can also try libasync through vibe.d as a built-in driver.

Tutorial

Only 2 examples are available at the moment, they are located in examples/tcp_listener and examples/tcp_client. They must be tested by starting the server before the client.

All current usage examples are available in source/libasync/test.d.

Documentation has been written thoughout the code.