Re: [boost] asio review results -- asio accepted

From: Jeff Garland (jeff_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-03-23 09:37:23

David Abrahams wrote:

>> Of course, like anything else, asio is not perfect -- a number of key 
>> issues were uncovered during the review.  In terms of required changes 
>> I'm only going to cite a few:
>>
>> - Fixes to dynamic memory allocation issues
>> - Interface changes to support ipv4 and ipv6 seamlessly at runtime
>> - Improvements to support strongly typed socket interfaces
> 
> If you're only citing a few of the required changes, where is the
> complete list?  Keeping it out of public view doesn't make any sense
> to me.

What I was trying to say was that I was only requiring a 3 changes -- so 
that's the entire list.  My feeling was these were the only 'must-have' 
changes even though there was certainly discussion of other changes and 
extensions.

>> Chris has communicated a couple possible solutions to the memory 
>> allocation issue and I'll ask that the interface and other changes for 
>> this issue continue to be discussed on the Boost list so consensus can 
>> be achieved on the best resolution.
>>
>> Other key improvements that should be explored as future enhancements 
>> include:
>>
>> - Possible removal of some of the c-style interfaces
>> - Exploration of higher level iostream integrations
>> - Performance improvements
>> - Improved documentation (wouldn't be Boost w/o this one)
>>
>> Chris has a much longer list of changes garnered from the review and is 
>> well on his way to addressing many of them.
>>
>> Note that there were several threads and discussions about performance, 
>> which is particularly critical for the domain covered by asio. One of 
>> the performance issues is the dynamic memory allocation issue cited 
>> above.  In general, the reviewers have extremely high expectations here. 
>> However, after reviewing the discussion and library it's my belief that 
>> many developers will find asio performance sufficient to build 
>> significant projects with only the memory allocation changes. I expect 
>> Chris will be able to address some of the other performance issues cited 
>> by reviewers in asio over time.
> 
> Are these issues addressable as an implementation detail, or will it
> cause an interface change?

I believe they are only implementation details (seems that Chris agrees 
with this) -- the c-style interfaces issue being the exception.  But it 
is a large library so it's possible we've missed something in the public 
interface that will need to change.    As for the c-style interfaces, 
the review discussion wasn't sufficient to convince me that it was a 
possible change and the benefits weren't clear so I'm leaving it to the 
discretion of the library author.

Jeff