Re: [Help-smalltalk] RE: MinGW patch

[Paolo Bonzini]

> Socket support on windows may need a bit more work as descriptors
> returned by socket() and fd's returned by open() can, in principle,
> clash.

I'm not sure this is true -- on Unix, they are the same `beast' and, on 
Windows, we can...

> use _open_osfhandle() and related functions to allocate a C RTL file
> descriptor to work with.

While other functions will not work, we can have wrappers on 
recvfrom/sendto that unbox the Windows handle and call the winsock function.

> I was wondering if GNU Smalltalk preserves the identity of socket and
> file descriptors inside its instances and so only calls recv()/send() on
> sockets and read()/write() on CRTL file descriptors?

It does (this was done as part of a half-hearted mingw port a few years 
ago, that introduced socketx.h as you found it).

Paolo