Announcements

• Assignment 8
  • Assignment 8 today Wednesday, due next Thursday, December 7^th.
  • Very generous late policy.
  • Assignments will be autograded without code reviews and made available by Sunday morning.
• Today's Lecture
  • Introduce nonblocking I/O.
    • Discuss what slow system calls are and why they're bad news for the threads of execution that need to make them.
    • Cover the implementation of non-blocking-alphabet-client.
    • Introduce the OutboundFile abstraction, which internally relies on nonblocking I/O to syndicate the contents of a file.
    • Without worrying about the implementation of the OutboundFile, we'll rely on them to implement a nonblocking web server capable of handling an incredibly large number of client connections in just one thread of execution.
    • Work through the implementation of the OutboundFile class.