Generic communication channels for things that can be represented as, or transformed to and from, byte vectors.

The FlatPort and FlatChan types implement the generic channel and port interface for arbitrary types and transport strategies. It can particularly be used to send and receive serializable types over I/O streams.

FlatPort and FlatChan implement the same comm traits as pipe-based ports and channels.

Example

This example sends boxed integers across tasks using serialization.

let (port, chan) = serial::pipe_stream();

do task::spawn || {
    for i in range(0, 10) {
        chan.send(@i)
    }
}

for i in range(0, 10) {
    assert @i == port.recv()
}

Safety Note

Flat pipes created from io::Readers and io::Writers share the same blocking properties as the underlying stream. Since some implementations block the scheduler thread, so will their pipes.