[boost] Testing interest for a shared memory/STL library proposal

From: Ion Gaztañaga (ion_g_m_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-11-09 13:23:34

Hello to all,

  My name is Ion Gaztañaga, a telecommunication engineer working in railway 
industry R&D . I've been lately working on a CUJ article about placing STL 
containers (and any other object) in shared memory using smart pointers 
instead of raw pointers as allocator::pointer.

  The article has been accepted for a future issue and is currently in a 
editing/reviewing phase. Working in this article, I've created a 
library/framework, developing some classes that I think can be useful for a 
new boost library.

  I would like to know if there is any interested in boost for developing 
such classes, based or not in my article ideas or code. If there is any 
interest, I would be glad to present a boostified version of the 
library/framework for a review proccess. Currently, the framework uses these 
ideas:

-> Relative pointers (smart pointers) for placing them in shared memory.
-> OS basic mechanism abstractions: shared-memory creation, process-shared 
mutex, named semaphore
-> Shared memory allocator for dynamic allocation/deallocation of parts of a 
shared memory segment.
-> Named shared memory allocation manager, so that any process can look for 
an object in shared memory.
-> Pooled shared memory allocator for node containers.
-> Some STL-like container examples that can be placed in shared memory for 
systems with no smart-pointer allocator::pointer supporting STLs
-> others...

  The framework works with Win32/Visual.NET 2003, QNX6.x/gcc-2.95.2,Mandrake 
Linux10.1/gcc-3.4.1 and partially (relative pointers and raw shmemory 
allocation) with Win32/VisualC++ 6.0. I've put a special full-length article 
in html and the source code in the file 
http://ice.prohosting.com/newfunk/boost_shmemSTL.zip, so that anyone can 
take a look. Please, you don't need to waste much time in the article, since 
I just want to know if contained ideas are interesting for boost. Please 
remember that some classes such as scoped-locks, etc... are in boost but I 
wanted the framework to be independent of any other library for this 
article. Of course, this would change in an hypotetic boostified version, 
since this is only to get an idea.

Please, feel free to comment/critisize. Regards,

Ion