=head1 NAME

AnyEvent::Impl::POE - AnyEvent adaptor for POE

=encoding utf-8

=head1 SYNOPSIS

   use AnyEvent;
   use POE;
  
   # this module gets loaded automatically as required

=head1 DESCRIPTION

This module provides transparent support for AnyEvent. You don't have to
do anything to make POE work with AnyEvent except by loading POE before
creating the first AnyEvent watcher.

Unfortunately, POE isn't generic enough to implement a fully working
AnyEvent backend: POE is too badly designed, too badly documented and too
badly implemented.

Here are the details, and what it means to you if you want to be
interoperable with POE:

=over 4

=item Weird messages

If you only use C<run_one_timeslice> (as AnyEvent has to for it's
condition variables), POE will print an ugly, unsupressable, message at
program exit:

   Sessions were started, but POE::Kernel's run() method was never...

The message is correct, the question is why POE prints it in the first
place in a correct program (this is not a singular case though).

The only way I found to work around this bug was to call C<<
->run >> at AnyEvent loading time and stop the kernel immediately
again. Unfortunately, due to another design bug in POE, this cannot be
done (by documented means at least) without throwing away events in the
event queue.

The author of POE verified that this is indeed true, and has no plans to
change this.

This means that you will either have to live with lost events or you have
to make sure to load AnyEvent early enough (this is usually not that
difficult in a main program, but hard in a module).

=item One POE session per Event

AnyEvent has to create one POE::Session per event watcher, which is
immensely slow and makes watchers very large. The reason for this is
lacking lifetime management (mostly undocumented, too). Without one
session/watcher it is not possible to easily keep the kernel from running
endlessly.

This is not just a problem with the way AnyEvent has to interact with
POE, but is a principal issue with POEs lifetime management (namely
that stopping the kernel stops sessions, but AnyEvent has no control
over who and when the kernel starts or stops w.r.t. AnyEvent watcher
creation/destruction).

From benchmark data it is not clear that session creation is that costly,
though - the real inefficiencies with POE seem to come from other sources,
such as event handling.

=item One watcher per fd/event combo

POE, of course, suffers from the same bug as Tk and some other badly
designed event models in that it doesn't support multiple watchers per
fd/poll combo. The workaround is the same as with Tk: AnyEvent::Impl::POE
creates a separate file descriptor to hand to POE, which isn't fast and
certainly not nice to your resources.

Of course, without the workaround, POE also prints ugly messages again
that say the program *might* be buggy.

While this is not good to performance, at least regarding speed, with a
modern Linux kernel, the overhead is actually quite small.

=item Timing Deficiencies

POE manages to not have a function that returns the current time. This is
extremely problematic, as POE can use different time functions, which can
differ by more than a second - and user code is left guessing which one is
used.

In addition, most timer functions in POE want an absoltue timestamp, which
is hard to create if all you have is a relative time and no function to
return the "current time".

And of course POE doesn't handle time jumps at all (not even when using
an event loop that happens to do that, such as L<EV>, as it does its own
unoptimised timer management).

AnyEvent works around the unavailability of the current time using