Re: [boost] Active objects?

From: Cory Nelson (phrosty_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-11-01 10:45:04

I saw that presentation too, it is very impressive and I can't wait to
see what comes of it.

I would love to see something like this go into boost but somehow I
don't think it could be done elegantly without language and compiler
support.  Definitely wouldn't complain if someone proved me wrong :)

On 10/30/05, Jason Hise <chaos_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> I watched the talk Herb Sutter gave recently regarding concurrency, and
> I have to say I find the ideas of active objects and future variables to
> be very exciting.  (A link to the talk is provided below, which must be
> viewed with Internet Explorer).  I noticed that Boost already has a
> futures library in the sandbox under development, which from what I can
> tell looks well designed.  Are there any plans to add the functionality
> of active objects to boost as well?  I would be interested in hearing
> how you think the problem would be best approached.
>
>  From what I can tell, it should ideally be possible to use 'active' as
> a modifier like 'const' or 'volatile' in front of a specific object
> instance, and have all member function calls automatically add
> themselves to a queue when called, instead of actually being called.
> Because this syntax is probably impossible to pull off, I think the next
> best thing would look something like the following:
>
> struct MyClass
> {
>     int foo ( int arg1, const char * arg2 );
> };
>
> void test (  )
> {
>     active < MyClass > object;
>     future < int > i = object.request ( MyClass::foo, 42, "blah" );
> }
>
> 'request' could also be spelled 'enqueue', 'invoke', or 'operator ()',
> although I'm not sure if the terseness of the latter would be sensible.
> 'active' would probably use CRTP to derive privately from 'MyClass',
> enforcing that member functions of MyClass are not called directly.
> Thoughts?
>
> Herb Sutter's video:
> http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05/TLN/TLN309_files/Default.htm#nopreload=1&autostart=1
>
> -Jason
>
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--
Cory Nelson
http://www.int64.org