[physfs] 2.0 wishlist...

[Adam D. Moss]

Brian Hook wrote:
>>Full-on async-I/O is probably overkill/overengineering for physfs's
>>remit (not that it wouldn't be nice!), but non-blocking I/O would
>>be an adequate basis for some nice things like speculative pulling-
>>in of level and texture data without causing unavoidable troughs in
>>the frame rate.
> 
> Can't the application handle this by spawning a separate thread 
> instead of relying on presumably platform-specific non-blocking IO 
> routines?

Threading is hell (not to mention that some plats don't have
usable threads).  Nonblocking IO doesn't involve using platform-
specific IO routines; regular O_NONBLOCK/O_NDELAY are pretty old
and well-handled flags working in accord with open()/read()/etc.

--Adam