Hello Simon i'm now write some sort of new i/o library. one area where i currently lacks in comparision to the existing Handles implementation in GHC, is the asynchronous i/o operations. can you please briefly describe how this is done in GHC and partially - why the multiple buffers are used? i'm now use just one buffer, which can contain read or write data, but not both - this buffer is just flushed before switching "mode" of operations. am i lose something due to this simplified algorithm? moreover, i have an idea how to implement async i/o without complex burecreacy: use mmapped files, may be together with miltiple buffers. for example, we can allocate four 16kb buffers. when one buffer is filled with written data, the program unmaps it and switches to use the next buffer. i don't tested it, but OS can guess that unmapped buffer now should be asynchronously written to disk. the same for reading - when we completely read one buffer, we can unmap it, switch to the second buffer and map the third so that the OS can asynchronously fill the third buffer while we are reading second. should this work, at least on the main desktop OSes? at least, mmap/VirtualAlloc available afaik on the all ghc-supported platforms, so this should work anywhere. of course, this scheme omits async i/o on sockets in Windows -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:bulatz@HotPOP.com