Re: [boost] Inactive Objects

From: Mark Blewett (boost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-03-18 20:13:51

At 23:08 11/03/2004, you wrote:

>Hi to those folks that contributed to some recent messages
>related to threads, active objects and reactive objects.
>Mostly this was Matthew Vogt.
>
>So this is mostly for Matthew but anyone else can certainly
>respond.
>
><snip>
>I would have posted the document but it is quite long. If
>anyone is interested in it then just ask for it. Its a rambling
>piece but it has been reviewed :-)
>
>Cheers,
>Scott

Hi Scott, sorry for being quiet... too much other (paid) work to do :o(

I'm interested in your spec.. if you can email me direct 
(boost_at_[hidden]) I'll have a look, but at this time I have 
minimal time spare until May'ish :o(

Going back "to basics"....

I think you said (in one of the messages I saw)  that there was a lot of 
associated code needed to support (In)active objects.. thats the conclusion 
that I came to, along with how protective it should be (how thread aware 
the user needs to be), how it imposes on the developers thought process 
(normal functional coding v state machines).. and intern wether it was in 
the scope of boost, or a framework in it's own right.

In retrospect, I wonder if some building blocks are needed first?

Personally it would be nice if boost helps with the development of 
multi-thread applications. In some form it does already with threads, 
mutexs etc, but for me it's not quite enough.. to me multi-thread starts to 
imply being scaleable.

IMHO (apart from inter-thread comms) that means support for asynchronous 
i/o. For example if boost.sockets only supported blocking calls, I would be 
disappointed, at a minimum i'd expect to be able to write a "commercial" 
webserver.

This is where I run into problems... how far should boost abstract the 
underlying system? Yes it would be nice to have a well defined, standard, 
tested common asynchronous i/o library... but is it an abstraction too far?

Regards
Mark


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