Re: [boost] [rfc] I/O Chain Library, Preview Release

From: Scott Woods (scott.suzuki_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-12-03 02:56:21

Hi Sebastien,

Lots of questions spring to mind but I suspect that for most of them
your response would be that this is a preview release. So just a bit
of general feedback;

* there seems to be a lot of work there,
* a list of benefits/advantages of IOChain over existing io streams
might be good?
* some common usage examples might be good? i.e. configuration
and/or application-specific "document"
* is it possible to have runtime-selectable links in the IO chain?
e.g. user selection of the encoding to be used.

Cheers.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sebastian Redl" <sebastian.redl_at_[hidden]>
To: <boost_at_[hidden]>
Sent: Saturday, December 01, 2007 12:43 PM
Subject: [boost] [rfc] I/O Chain Library, Preview Release

> Hi,
>
> Back in June I posted some thoughts about what I'd expect from a
> properly done I/O library.[1] Based on the ensuing discussion I then
> designed such a library. Over the last months, I've worked hard at
> implementing the thing.
>
> It is with quite a bit of pride, then, that I announce the IOChain
> preview release 1.
>
> You can get the source here:
> http://stud3.tuwien.ac.at/~e0226430/iochain-preview-1.tar.bz2
> There are currently some assumptions in the build files that require a
> tiny bit of setup.
> 1) Unpack the source into some directory.
> 2) Grab the latest Boost trunk.
> 3) In the unpacked source, make a symlink to the Boost trunk called
> "realboost".
> E.g.
> tar -xjf iochain-preview-1.tar.bz2
> cd iochain
> ln -s /path/to/boost/trunk realboost
> 4) Add zlib to your user config. If you have zlib where it is easily
> found, this is as easy as adding this line to ${HOME}/user-config.jam:
> lib zlib : : <name>z ;
>
> I'm sorry for the inconvenience.
>
> Documentation is in quickbook format. A generated version is available 
> here:
> http://stud3.tuwien.ac.at/~e0226430/iochain/
>
> This is a preview release. Its only purpose is to get comments. It has
> not seen widespread compiler testing yet (only GCC 4.1 on a 64-bit
> Linux). Features implemented so far:
> - The infrastructure.
> - File I/O (POSIX only - a Win32 implementation exists, but hasn't seen
> a compiler yet, so don't expect it to compile, much less work)
> - In-memory I/O (fixed buffers and std::vector).
> - Read-ahead and write-collect buffers (like buffering in the current
> streams).
> - Various tools to support backtracking.
> - Combining bytes into larger types. (Only naive methods currently.)
> - On-the-fly CRC calculation.
> - On-the-fly zlib compression.
>
> The ultimate goal of the library is to completely replace iostreams.
>
> All discussion, suggestions, and criticisms are welcome.
>
> Sebastian Redl
>
>
> [1] http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2007/06/123478.php
>
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