Re: [boost] Boost.Threads, N2178, N2184, et al

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-03-19 18:38:19

Yuval Ronen wrote:
> Peter Dimov wrote:
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> I'd like to start working on a Boost implementation of my threading
>> proposal N2178:
>>
>> http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n2178.html
>
> Just some naming comments, if I may:
>
> It seems to me the word "lock" is used with different meanings. For
> example, there's a "rwlock" and the scoped wrappers for it are
> "read_lock" and "write_lock". Very confusing, IMO. I think the word
> "lock" should either be used for the synchronization classes, or for
> the scoped wrappers, but not both.

I've consistently used the POSIX names. I agree that it's unfortunate that 
they used mutex and rwlock for the two primitives.

> The word "scoped" appears only for mutex's scoped_lock, although
> read_lock and write_lock are also scoped. My opinion is that this word
> should either be part of the names of all the scoped wrappers or none
> of them, in a uniform manner.

I tried the "none of them" approach, calling scoped_lock just lock, but it 
turned out to not work well in practice since it's better to reserve 'lock' 
for the variable name. I could've gone with Howard's exclusive_lock, but 
it's a bit too lengthy and hard to type for repeated use.