I've written a number of C++/MFC programs using the overlapped I/O approach, and it has always been a real pain. Even MSDN doesn't really seem to like it:
The problem with doing asynchronous I/O with OVERLAPPED function calls like ReadFileEx is that you have to be extremely careful with how you design your program to continue executing with a callback function or by waiting on an EVENT handle to get signaled. The callback function requires dealing with alertable states, which is really error-prone. No, seriously, don't do it because dealing with the re-entrancy can drive you nuts. Alertable wait states are terribly hard to reason about because it is the non-GUI analog to pumping messages (c.f. Raymond Chen).
So I recently started using IOCP for the same purposes, and I'm happy to report that it works much better! I guess that shouldn't be a surprise because it's been recommended by some excellent programmers. Anyway, here's the rough idea of how I got it to work for me:
- Create a background thread with an IOCP handle.
- Open a file (or socket, serial port, etc.) with OpenFile and associate it with the IOCP.
- Initiate I/O using ReadFile (not ReadFileEx).
- Handle both synchronous and asynchronous completion of the I/O.
That last point was the hardest for me to realize that I absolutely have to deal with synchronous, immediate completion of the I/O (not just asynchronous completion from the IOCP). So you really do have to check the return value from ReadFile and also GetLastError() == ERROR_IO_PENDING.
IOCP is so good that it is the basis for C#'s multi-threading I/O. The designers of C# must not have even cared about the old ways to do I/O (e.g., waiting on events, alertable callbacks with APCs, OVERLAPPED callback functions, etc.).
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