Sink (computing)

An event sink is a class or function designed to receive incoming events from another object or function. This is commonly implemented in C++ as callbacks. Other object-oriented languages, such as Java and C#, have built-in support for sinks by allowing events to be fired to delegate functions.

Due to lack of formal definition, a sink is often misconstrued with a gateway, which is a similar construct but the latter is usually either an end-point or allows bi-direction communication between dissimilar systems, as opposed to just an event input point . This is often seen in C++ and hardware-related programming , thus the choice of nomenclature by a developer usually depends on whether the agent acting on a sink is a producer or consumer of the sink content.

In a Directed acyclic graph, a source node is a node (also known as a vertex) with no incoming connections from other nodes, while a sink node is a node without outgoing connections.[1]

Directed acyclic graphs are used in instruction scheduling, neural networks and data compression.

In several computer programs employing streams, such as GStreamer, PulseAudio, or PipeWire, a source is the starting point of a pipeline which produces a stream but does not consume any, while a sink is the end point which accepts a stream without producing any.[2]

An example is an audio pipeline in the PulseAudio sound system. An input device such as a microphone is a type of audio source, while an output device like a speaker is the audio sink.[3]

The word sink has been used for both input and output in the industry. Mobile sink is proposed to save sensor energy for multihop communication in transferring data to a base station (sink) in wireless sensor networks.

• Flow network
• Event-driven architecture