TDM Rerun #4: Let's Cooperate

Every serious Windows programmer who has developed at least one multi-threaded application knows about thread synchronisation. You know what I mean: critical sections, mutexes, semaphores, signals and so on. ... But to write truly distributed applications, running on different computers, we need new tools.

- Let's Cooperate, The Delphi Magazine #68, April 2001

I don't remember what was the exact reason for this article, but obviously I was working on some multi-process multi-computer solution and I needed a way to synchronise those computers. Of course, once I started writing the article, it got completely out of hand and I finished with file system based mutex, critical section, group, event, and even with a message queue and single-writer-multiple-readers synchronisation primitive. There were also many state diagrams like the one of the right dispersed through the article. Poor readers. >:-(

The plan was to make most of them work on Linux as well, but as I discovered in File Sharing on Linux (not yet published on my blog), but as I found later, this was nearly impossible to do as Linux implements file locking in completely different way.

I never used those primitives much as TCP/IP communication became much more prominent in later years. Still, they can be very useful if you want to quickly put together a multi-computer demo or quick and dirty solution.

The GpFileSync unit never made it to my web so I'm linking to the current version at the bottom of this article.

Links: article (PDF, 117 KB), source code (ZIP, 47 KB), current GpFileSync unit