Re: [boost] asio review extended till Dec 30th

From: Jody Hagins (jody-boost-011304_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-12-29 16:51:00

On Fri, 30 Dec 2005 08:29:33 +1100 (EST)
Christopher Kohlhoff <chris_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> If I do as Peter suggested and check for the absence of
> BOOST_HAS_THREADS you probably don't need to do anything.

You'd have to do that in the demuxer and any other place as well.  Maybe
you should define a null mutex type for use in those cases.  That way,
any code that uses synchronization primitives will automatically do
nothing.

> > However, the control flow for the demuxer will be executed in
> > a single thread, and should not be doing anything with
> > synchronization primitives.
> 
> Actually the demuxer is partly intended to provide you with a
> thread-safe way of passing work across threads, i.e.
> demuxer.post() can be called from any thread to invoke a
> function in the single thread that is calling demuxer.run().

Look at the implementation of epoll_reactor though.  There are a few
issues with it, especially when you have multiple threads in the run()
function.

> > Part of what bothers me is that boost is a modern C++ library,
> > and as such has many tools to allow different practices, yet
> > we still use IFDEFs and blindly insert synchronization
> > primitives in places where they are not needed.
> 
> I'm going to talk about this more in another reply, but I
> believe that the current interfaces can be implemented to be
> thread-safe without using mutexes.

OK, thanks!  I look forward to it.  BTW, I am trying to reimplement
(using asio) a major component in wide use everyday in a bunch of
networking applications.  I'm running out of time, and I'm actually home
sick right now, so I may not finish.  Anyway, I thought it would give me
some good ground on which to base a review.

I will possibly have issues that may not pertain to the review itself. 
Can I send them to your private email address, or should I keep them
here?

Again, thanks for the hard work on asio.