Re: [boost] [asio] Formal Review

From: Christopher Kohlhoff (chris_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-01-03 07:17:40

Hi Giovanni,

--- "Giovanni P. Deretta" <gpderetta_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> Sometimes you need to make some hard decision. There are any
> real-life protocol/platform that need shared state? If yes,
> than member functions is fine.

An example might be an operating system where the I/O is
implemented by a separate process, and communication with this
process takes place over some sort of IPC channel. Symbian is an
example of an operating system that uses this approach. I want
asio's public interface to support an implementation on systems
that use this mechanism.

> If not, or only some theoretical obscure protocol needs it, it
> should not impact the generic interface. For those
> obscure/rarely used protocol/platforms a hidden singleton
> could be used.

Symbian, as it happens, doesn't support static or global data,
so singletons are out :)

<snip>
> Hum, nice, but if you want to forward a buffer another thread, for
> example, you want to forward the complete type (to preserve the
> counter and the acquire()/release() infrastructure).

Yep, this is already possible since the caller's Mutable_Buffers
(or Const_Buffers) type is preserved down into the
implementation.

> I think that it should be possible to implement some streams
> that in addition to generic buffer object can accept
> specialized per stream buffer types and guarantee special
> treatment for them.  For example if write() is called for
> inprocess shared memory stream, will copy the buffer if a
> generic buffer is passed, but will give special treatment if a
> special shared buffer is passed.
<snip>
> In the end this boils down to passing the exact buffer type to
> the lower levels of asio implementation.

Which I do already :)

I think special cases (such as aligned or shared-memory buffers)
could be handled by implementation overloads (note: not function
overloads in the public interface) based on the type of
Mutable_Buffers::value_type or Const_Buffers::value_type.

That way individual streams can be optimised for specific buffer
types without propagating additional overloads back through to
the interface.

Cheers,
Chris