Section 7.8. Summary

7.8. Summary

This chapter introduced the lowest level, cross-platform, C-programming API for Zeroconf's DNS Service Discovery. It also introduced the important DNS-SD concepts of asynchronous event handling and continuous live updating, which apply no matter which language or API you choose to use. The following chapters present other APIs and languages. In some, callbacks are scheduled preemptively using threads, and you need to take care to write thread-safe code. In others, callbacks are scheduled cooperatively out of a main event loop, and you don't have to worry about thread safety, reentry, and race conditions, but in your callback functions and methods you need to be careful to avoid doing time-consuming operations. If your callback function or method does anything that blocks for a long period of time, you'll cause your application's whole user interface to lock up while it waits for your callback to finish what it's doing.