computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, e ...

, a sink, or data sink generally refers to the destination of data flow. The word sink has multiple uses in computing. In

software engineering Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...

, an event sink is a class or function that receives events from another object or function, while a sink can also refer to a node of a

directed acyclic graph In mathematics, particularly graph theory, and computer science, a directed acyclic graph (DAG) is a directed graph with no directed cycles. That is, it consists of vertices and edges (also called ''arcs''), with each edge directed from one ve ...

with no additional nodes leading out from it, among other uses.

In software engineering

An event sink is a

class Class or The Class may refer to: Common uses not otherwise categorized * Class (biology), a taxonomic rank * Class (knowledge representation), a collection of individuals or objects * Class (philosophy), an analytical concept used differentl ...

function Function or functionality may refer to: Computing * Function key, a type of key on computer keyboards * Function model, a structured representation of processes in a system * Function object or functor or functionoid, a concept of object-oriente ...

designed to receive incoming

events Event may refer to: Gatherings of people * Ceremony, an event of ritual significance, performed on a special occasion * Convention (meeting), a gathering of individuals engaged in some common interest * Event management, the organization of ev ...

from another

object Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an ...

or function. This is commonly implemented in

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

callback Callback may refer to: * Callback (comedy), a joke which refers to one previously told * Callback (computer programming), executable code that is passed as a parameter to other code * Callback (telecommunications), the telecommunications event th ...

s. Other

object-oriented languages Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "Object (computer science), objects", which can contain data and Computer program, code. The data is in the form of Field (computer science), fields (often kno ...

, such as

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

and C#, have built-in support for sinks by allowing events to be fired to

delegate Delegate or delegates may refer to: * Delegate, New South Wales, a town in Australia * Delegate (CLI), a computer programming technique * Delegate (American politics), a representative in any of various political organizations * Delegate (Unit ...

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 graph theory

In a

Directed acyclic graph In mathematics, particularly graph theory, and computer science, a directed acyclic graph (DAG) is a directed graph with no directed cycles. That is, it consists of vertices and edges (also called ''arcs''), with each edge directed from one ve ...

, a source node is a node (also known as a

vertex Vertex, vertices or vertexes may refer to: Science and technology Mathematics and computer science *Vertex (geometry), a point where two or more curves, lines, or edges meet * Vertex (computer graphics), a data structure that describes the positio ...

) with no incoming connections from other nodes, while a sink node is a node without outgoing connections. Directed acyclic graphs are used in

instruction scheduling In computer science, instruction scheduling is a compiler optimization used to improve instruction-level parallelism, which improves performance on machines with instruction pipelines. Put more simply, it tries to do the following without changing ...

neural networks A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...

and

data compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression ...

In stream processing

In several computer programs employing streams, such as

GStreamer GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one format, processes them, ...

PulseAudio PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD, macOS, as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operat ...

, or

PipeWire PipeWire is a server for handling audio, video streams, and hardware on Linux. It was created by Wim Taymans at Red Hat. It handles multimedia routing and pipeline processing. History In 2015, Taymans started work on PipeWire. It was based on ...

, 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. An example is an audio pipeline in the

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.

Other uses

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 In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted ...

to a base station (sink) in

wireless sensor network Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) refer to networks of spatially dispersed and dedicated sensors that monitor and record the physical conditions of the environment and forward the collected data to a central location. WSNs can measure environmental c ...

References

Object-oriented programming Network theory Networks {{Comp-stub

In software engineering

In graph theory

In stream processing

Other uses

See also

References