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From: Jeff Garland (jeff_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-02-05 11:35:37


On Thu, 5 Feb 2004 09:20:09 -0500, Bennett, Patrick wrote
> Honestly, I'd suggest you just use ACE for threading/synchronization
> primitives. It's available for a large number of platforms and is
> heavily used and frequently updated.

All true.

> I like Boost a lot, but I think some people are trying to make Boost
> more than (IMO) it should be. People discussing efficient io
> dispatch techniques for example would be better served to just use
> ACE, which already does many of these things extremely well.
> (http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html)

I say that it depends. If you need networking, threading, event loops, etc,
in C++ right now then yes, by all means you need to look at ACE. That said,
ACE is a huge library that is reasonably difficult to learn and that suffers
from it's own legacy. That legacy includes a long list of platforms,
compilers, and standard libraries that don't even come close to standard
C++. As a result ACE's code base is a macro nightmare and it doesn't utilize
the standard library as much as I'd like to see (it was around pre-standard
library). Right now boost threads is a minimalist solution without all the
legacy. So if I was trying to do some basic thread management I'd be looking
at Boost first and ACE second.

Further, even though I have used ACE sucessfully for years, I'd like to see
Boost libraries for networking and threading continue to move into ground
where I currently use ACE. The reason is simply that I believe choice and
diversity is good. And if the standards committee is ever going to look at a
networking library I'd like to have a Boost, more minimalist solution on the
table for discussion because I don't see how ACE can fill that bill....

Jeff


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