Re: [boost] [futures] boost::futures

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-03-09 18:54:57

Braddock Gaskill wrote:

> I noticed that none of the "future" C++ standardization proposals by
> Hinnant and Dimov, as well as Sutter's Concur implicitly create a new
> thread upon future construction like your simple_future
> implementation.
> As far as I can tell, their future classes are very simple and almost
> completely agnostic to the scheduling, threading, etc particulars.

Indeed, the intent has been for futures to support arbitrary asynchronous 
task execution, not just the simple thread per task model. One could imagine 
using futures over an interprocess protocol or TCP/IP.

My current proposal for std::future<R> is available at

http://www.pdimov.com/cpp/N2185.html

and will be part of the pre-meeting mailing. We'll see how it fares.

As an aside, does anyone have a success story about active objects? I can't 
seem to grasp their significance; in particular, how are they supposed to 
scale to many cores/HW threads if every access is implicitly serialized?