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#### Reactor-Style Operations

Sometimes a program must be integrated with a third-party library that wants to perform the I/O operations itself. To facilitate this, Boost.Asio includes synchronous and asynchronous operations that may be used to wait for a socket to become ready to read, ready to write, or to have a pending error condition.

As an example, to perform a non-blocking read something like the following may be used:

    ip::tcp::socket socket(my_io_context);
    ...
    socket.non_blocking(true);
    ...
    socket.async_wait(ip::tcp::socket::wait_read, read_handler);
    ...
    void read_handler(boost::system::error_code ec)
    {
      if (!ec)
      {
        std::vector<char> buf(socket.available());
        socket.read_some(buffer(buf));
      }
    }

These operations are supported for sockets on all platforms, and for the POSIX stream-oriented descriptor classes.

###### See Also

basic_socket::wait(), basic_socket::async_wait(), basic_socket::non_blocking(), basic_socket::native_non_blocking(), nonblocking example.