I have one confusion relating to IOCP (among so many others) as I am fairly new to multi-threaded programming. Can we not use IOCP without having to associate them with a device like a file/port/namedpipe etc.?
What I really want to do is to build a library that implements a Thread pool which caters to Queues with different priorities. Anyone using my library should be able to pass any function and any parameters - these may not just be reads and writes of IOs. IOCP seems to be the best for efficient management of a threadpool except that I need to associate a device with it. What if I am not working with files or communication over network? Maybe I just need different clients to perform different functions using thread pool, perhaps on the same machine? How can I workaround that?
Any hints, ideas, pointers will be much appreciated. Thanks for your help in advance, and kindly excuse my ignorance on this topic.