{"id":3387,"date":"2015-07-21T05:29:18","date_gmt":"2015-07-21T10:29:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/?p=3387"},"modified":"2015-07-21T05:29:18","modified_gmt":"2015-07-21T10:29:18","slug":"pevents-a-cross-platform-win32-events-library","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/pevents-a-cross-platform-win32-events-library\/","title":{"rendered":"pevents: a cross-platform Win32 events library"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Threads-GitHub\"<\/a>pevents, our implementation of Windows manual- and auto-reset events for Mac and Linux, is now officially pevents, our truly cross-platform win32 lightweight events library for Windows, Mac, Linux, and other platforms.\u00a0We first released pevents<\/a> way back in 2011, when we searched for and were unable to find an existing implementation of Windows events, the basic primitives for thread synchronization on Win32.<\/p>\n

The *nix world has seen a lot of progress when it comes to non-blocking waits in recent years, but it’s very recently that purely event-driven libraries like epoll and kqueue have properly taken off. In the Windows world, it’s long-been possible to wait on filesystem and network events with WaitForMultipleObjects<\/code><\/a>\u00a0– a paradigm most Windows C\/C++ developers are intimately familiar with. One thing that WaitForMultipleObjects<\/code> (and pevents!) can also do rather neatly is wait on multiple mutexes,\u00a0events, and\/or semaphores simultaneously, unblocking when one or more (or all) are triggered or available.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Something similar can be accomplished on Linux\/Mac\u00a0using posix condition variables and mutexes \u2013 but for developers more-accustomed to Windows auto or manual reset events and WaitForSingleObjectEx<\/code> or WaitForMultipleObjectsEx<\/code>, it can be difficult to make the jump. More importantly, code must be written from the ground-up to either use the WFMO or the condition variable pattern – meaning developers often face\u00a0a very hard time porting multi-threaded code from Windows to Linux and other posix platforms like Android and iOS (or vice-versa) without a complete rewrite of all thread synchronization.<\/p>\n

Enter pevents: a small, light library that implements Windows autoreset and manual-reset events on top of pthreads, and exposes the same API on Windows, Linux, and Mac. With this update, pevents officially supports Windows too, serving as a proxy for the native CreateEvent<\/code>, SetEvent<\/code>, ResetEvent<\/code>, PulseEvent<\/code>, WaitForSingleObject<\/code>, and WaitForMultipleObjects<\/code> functions. Developers are no longer required to surround all multithreading code with #ifdef to support both Windows and *nix multithreading from a single codebase.<\/p>\n

pevents<\/a> is 100% open source, available\u00a0under the terms of the liberal MIT license. It’s straight-forward and easy to use for anyone that’s previously used Windows events, and has been used by a number of larger teams and projects in the years since its release to great success. It’s available to pull and fork on GitHub – join in!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

pevents, our implementation of Windows manual- and auto-reset events for Mac and Linux, is now officially pevents, our truly cross-platform win32 lightweight events library for Windows, Mac, Linux, and other platforms.\u00a0We first released pevents way back in 2011, when we … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":505,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[325,759,899,898,11],"class_list":["post-3387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","tag-c","tag-github","tag-mulithreading","tag-pevents","tag-programming"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t