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Table Of Contents
Systems Programming with Zig
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Building a TCP proxy is a classic systems programming exercise that serves as an excellent litmus test for any language's I/O capabilities. In this section, we develop a utility that sits between a client and a destination server, forwarding raw byte streams in both directions. While a synchronous proxy would require two dedicated OS threads per connection — one for each direction of the data flow — our asynchronous implementation leverages the power of the std.Io interface to multiplex thousands of these proxy pairs onto a single execution thread. This project transitions from the abstract concepts of event loops into a concrete tool, demonstrating how to manage multiple file descriptors and maintain state across non-blocking boundaries.
The primary advantage of an asynchronous TCP proxy is its horizontal scalability. Because we are not allocating a 2MB or 8MB stack for every concurrent connection, the memory footprint of the proxy...