Re: [boost] Active objects?

From: Reece Dunn (msclrhd_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-11-01 11:23:27

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

Yeah, having active and futures support would make writing multithreaded 
apps a dream.

>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 :)

Active objects would be very hard to do *automatically* since the object is 
a thread (very neat concept), with the constructor, methods and destructor 
being processed as messages to the object's thread.

However, the active lambda stuff could possibly be done as an extension of 
Boost.Lambda using Spirit/Phoenix sugar:

   future< int > = active<>[ _1 = _1 + 2 ];

I'd have to thing about the other things and how to make the above (or 
something like it) work.

Maybe we could create virual classes in a similar way that Boost.Python 
works that wraps the method calls into messages. Sort of a C++ to threaded 
C++ language binding.

- Reece