Re: [boost] [SoC][Act]Concurrency library

From: Matt Calabrese (rivorus_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-05-01 13:24:11

On 5/1/06, Beman Dawes <bdawes_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> If you haven't done so already, be sure to look at Ion Gaztañaga's
> implementation in the Boost Vault of Kevlin Henney's N1883 futures design.
> It is under active development.
>
> --Beman
>

I'm aware of the futures in active development, though my library is unique
with respect to other active function and active object implementations in
that it avoids the concept of futures almost entirely, or rather, merges the
concept of futures with the concept of a running asynchronous function
(represented by an action in the library) and the concept of active objects
as conceptual return types of asynchronous calls rather than "future"
values. By that I mean in order to create an active function call, you
merely instantiate an action, passing the function object and arguments to
the constructor. Access to the return value is granted through the action
indirectly with * and -> but the interface of the value is actually the
associated active qualified form of the return type and so operations
performed on it are all serialized and do not imply a wait, even for complex
user-defined types. Basically, instead of futures, the return type is
thought of as an active type whose
thread is not created until operations on it are queued. This provides
a superset of the functionality provided by futures as you can still
get the "inactive" form of the return type and force a wait
for any
type, however such a loss of concurrency is not necessary for any type which
has a well-defined active interface, including complex user-defined types.

--
-Matt Calabrese