Re: [boost] Late asio review

From: Caleb Epstein (caleb.epstein_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-01-12 09:10:46

On 1/10/06, Chris Cleeland <cleeland_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
>
> 2. unnecessary features
>
>    Is hostname resolution really so much of an overhead that we need
>    asynch hostname resolution?  If the feature were basically "free", I
> would

Yes, it can be.  In any application I've ever seen that does potentially
large numbers of Internet hostname lookups (e.g. web browsers, spiders, and
the like), hostname resolution is delegated to one or more background
threads.  There is simply no predicting how long a query might or might not
take.

   say okay, but the fact that it requires firing up an extra thread behind
>    the scenes (another one of my pet peeves) makes it seem like a wholly
>    unnecessary feature.

I think that very few, if any, platforms ship with an asynchronous resolver
API at present (OSX 10.4 maybe?) but I'm sure Chris will make every effort
to make use of these when they come into being.

--
Caleb Epstein
caleb dot epstein at gmail dot com