How has support for select and non-blocking I/O changed across recent Perl versions?

In recent versions of Perl, support for select and non-blocking I/O has evolved significantly. The introduction of new modules and improvements in core functionalities have made it easier for developers to handle asynchronous operations and improve performance in network applications.

Perl's select function allows for monitoring multiple filehandles for readiness to read or write. While the basic functionality remains the same, enhancements in documentation and community-contributed modules have broadened the scope for non-blocking I/O operations.

In Perl 5.22 and onwards, the integration of the IO::Async module has made handling asynchronous I/O tasks more streamlined. The module allows users to manage events, timers, and processes without dealing with complex select loops manually.

Here's an example of using select for non-blocking I/O:

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use IO::Socket; my $socket = IO::Socket::INET->new( PeerAddr => 'example.com', PeerPort => '80', Proto => 'tcp', ) or die "Could not create socket: $!"; my $timeout = 5; # Five seconds my $rin = ''; vec($rin, fileno($socket), 1) = 1; my $nfound = select($rin, undef, undef, $timeout); if ($nfound) { print "Socket is ready to read.\n"; } else { print "Socket timed out.\n"; }

Perl select non-blocking I/O IO::Async network programming