Re: Re: [boost] Re: Next revision of boost::thread

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-01-09 21:37:52

At 02:59 PM 1/9/2003, William E. Kempf wrote:

 >> From: Beman Dawes <bdawes_at_[hidden]>
 >> I'm not saying Boost.Threads should take exactly the same approach,
 >> but I'd rather not see a lot of optional/conditional features to
 >> support operating systems other than those two O/S families.
 >
 >Well, everything that's optional in what I proposed for Boost.Threads (so 

 >far) happens to also be optional on POSIX (and by using the same
 >conditional compilation scheme).

So, don't provide Boost.Threads support for POSIX operating system flavors 
which don't provide important optional POSIX features. Do any of the 
important flavors of POSIX systems not provide these options?

Remember, too, that you don't have to specify everything. You can leave it 
up to the implementor to decide what to do on a crippled operating system. 
I have a suspicion that is what the Standards committee may do with a lot 
of thread related changes that we always assumed would go into the core 
language execution model - don't mention the details, and just expect the 
library implementor to make it all work correctly in the eyes of users. 
Just as is done with the external effects of I/O operations now.

People will be afraid to use Boost.Threads if they think that even on a 
fully-feature operating system some Boost.Threads features may not be 
available, or the features may be available with one compiler but not 
another.

--Beman