I'm trying to find the best solution for nonblocking IO via stdin/stdout with the following characteristics:
- As long as there is enough data, read in n-sized chunks.
- If there's not enough data, read in a partial chunk.
- If there is no data available, block until there is some (even though it may be smaller than n).
The goal is to allow efficient transfer for large datasets while processing 'control' codes immediately (instead of having them linger in some partially-filled buffer somewhere).
I know I can achieve this by using threads and a istream::get() loop, or by writing a bunch of platform-specific code (since you can't select() on file handles in windows)... ((There is also istream::readsome() which seems promising, but the only results I can find on google were of people saying it doesn't actually work well.))
Since I haven't done much coding w/ these APIs, perhaps there is a better way.