Using Tokio I/O libraries outside a Tokio executor

[jgcodes2020]

I'd like to write a Tokio-friendly GUI library. The idea is that I/O and UI functionality will run off a single-threaded Tokio runtime, allowing developers to use the vast wealth of networking libraries available for Tokio without spinning up extra threads. To make such a library feasible on Windows, I need to be able poll both the Tokio runtime and the Windows message queue to receive events.

Neither Tokio nor its event loop (MIO) support polling the Windows message queue, even though there is a function for doing it in the Windows API (MsgWaitForMultipleObjects). If you're suggesting to use a second thread to run Tokio, that defeats the purpose of this post. Ideally, you should be able to run non-Send futures in this manner.

GLib already implements such functionality and uses it in GDK/GTK to handle window messages.

[Darksonn]

Unfortunately, the Tokio team is lacking in Windows experts and we do not have the bandwidth to implement new Windows features at this time. If you have Windows expertise and would like to work on this, please reach out in the #mio channel on discord, as that is where this work would have to happen.