TCP Server in Zig - Part 8 - Epoll & Kqueue

In the last post, we looked at some of Zig' weirder syntax. Specifically, this line of code: var gpa = std.heap.GeneralPurposeAllocator(.{}){}; While you'll commonly run into the above when looking at Zig code or going through Zig learning resources, some people pointed out that the code could be improved by doing: var gpa:...

One of the first pieces of Zig code that you're likely to see, and write, is this beginner-unfriendly line: var gpa = std.heap.GeneralPurposeAllocator(.{}){}; While we can reason that we're creating an allocator, the (.{}){} syntax can seem a bit much. This is a combination of three separate language features: generics, anonymous struct literals...

kqueue is a BSD/MacOS alternative over poll. In most ways, kqueue is similar to the Linux-specific epoll, which itself is important, but important, incremental upgrade to poll. Because kqueue has a single function it superficially looks like poll. But, as we'll soon see, that single function can behave in two different ways, making its API and...

In the last two parts we introduced the poll system call and, with it, patterns around evented I/O. poll has the advantage of being simple to use and supported on most platforms. However, as we saw, we need to iterate through all monitored sockets to figure out which is ready. Another awkwardness with poll's API is associating...

In the previous part we introduced non-blocking sockets and used them, along with the poll system call, to maximize the efficiency of our server. Rather than having a thread-per-connection, waiting on data, a single thread can now manage multiple client connections. But this performance leap doesn't come for free: our code has gotten more...