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Comment by fopen64

7 years ago

When I learnt how fork() and select() worked, I just felt in love with Unix. The Win32 API was so ad-hoc and unnatural in direct comparison.

You fell in love with Unix because of a hacky unintuitive syscall? I'd suggest reading the paper!

For me it was poll() due to it's simple and intuitive API. Also, it's much faster then select() when you have a large number of file descriptors being monitored.

  • For some reason the book (Beginning Linux Programming, Wrox Press, 1998 edition I think) explained select() first, so like the proverbial little duck that names 'mother' the first think it sees moving after hatch, select() caught my heart.