[fpc-devel] Inconsistent use of Timeout in SimpleIPC

[Denis Kozlov]

There is another problem with SimpleIPC on Windows.

This same problem was experienced in @Juha's post "SimpleIPC and
TWinMsgServerComm.PeekMessage":
http://lists.freepascal.org/pipermail/fpc-devel/2013-October/032871.html

TWinMsgServerComm.PeekMessage never waits for a Timeout because of this
line:
> MsgWaitForMultipleObjects(1,FHWND,False,TimeOut,QS_SENDMESSAGE);

It always fails and returns immediately WAIT_FAILED with GetLastError
saying "Invalid handle". As per documentation at MSDN,
MsgWaitForMultipleObjects does not work with window handles. Funny thing is
that I am pretty sure that this line used to work in the past, on much
older OS, perhaps XP before SP3 or earlier. It used to be able to wait, but
definitely not any more (tested on 7 SP1 and XP SP3).

I suspect that the reason why it might have worked in the past is because
MsgWaitForMultipleObjects behind the scene (according to MS engineers) also
waits for a signal on the current thread (in addition to signals on
whatever handles you provide). I also suspect that on older OS versions
MsgWaitForMultipleObjects did not fail and return immediately if one of
those handles was invalid, meaning that it will continue waiting for a
signal to the current thread, which would then get signalled when a thread
message arrived and it actually would perform as intended.

On newer OS, it seems that MsgWaitForMultipleObjects always fails and
returns immediately if one of the supplied handles was invalid for its
purposes, e.g. window handle is supplied. It won't bother waiting for a
signal on thread behind the scene.

It can be resolved in one of 2 ways:
A) MsgWaitForMultipleObjects(0, nil, False, TimeOut, QS_SENDMESSAGE); //
wait for thread messages, window must be owned by the same thread.
B) SetTimer(HWND, Timeout); GetMessage(HWND); KillTimer; // use blocking
GetMessage, unblock it via WM_TIMER.

I found some other oddities but not ready to formalize them yet, I'll keep
experimenting.

Denis
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