Summary
In this chapter, we went through what OS-backed event queues are and gave a high-level overview of how they work. We also went through the defining characteristics of epoll, kqueue, and IOCP and focused on how they differ from each other.
In the last half of this chapter, we introduced some examples of syscalls. We discussed raw syscalls, and “normal” syscalls so that you know what they are and have seen examples of both. We also took the opportunity to talk about abstraction levels and the advantages of relying on good abstractions when they’re available to us.
As a part of making system calls, you also got an introduction to Rusts FFI.
Finally, we created a cross-platform abstraction. You also saw some of the challenges that come with creating a unifying API that works across several operating systems.
The next chapter will walk you through an example using epoll to create a simple event queue, so you get to see exactly how this works in practice...
