nclack / chan

Chan is a cross-platform zero-copy multi-producer mutli-consumer asynchronous FIFO queue for passing messages between threads.

#Chan

Chan is a cross-platfrom zero-copy multi-producer multi-consumer asynchronous FIFO queue written in C.

Introduction

I tried to keep the interface simple. See the detailed API docs for more. The documentation and testing framework have some examples of use.

Reading and writing to the queue are both performed via Chan_Next(). Whether a "read" or a "write" happens depends on the mode passed to Chan_Open(), which returns a reference-counted "reader" or "writer" reference to the queue.

Chan was designed so that Chan_Next() operations block the calling thread under some circumstances. With proper use, this design garauntees that certain networks of threads (namely, directed acyclic graphs) connected by Chan instances will deliver every message emited from a producer to a consumer in that network. Once the network is assembled, messages will be recieved in topological order.

Building

I use CMake to configure and build. There are no other dependencies besides that and a compiler such as gcc, Visual Studio, or clang.

Building usually looks like this:

 mkdir build
 cd build
 cmake ..
 make