Re: [boost] Future of Boost.Thread, date-time, and C++0x

From: Anthony Williams (anthony_w.geo_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-10-08 10:42:29

Jeff Garland <jeff_at_[hidden]> writes:

> At the Kona meeting (just finished) the standard committee made very 
> significant progress on threading for C++0x -- voting in a proposal written by 
> Howard H, Beman, Anthony Williams, myself, and others -- subject to wording 
> changes to be made by a small drafting committee.  Basically we were in 
> agreement on semantics, but even after several late night drafting sessions 
> people weren't happy with the standardeze.

That's unfortunate.

> While much of the proposal is based on Boost.thread it has some serious 
> departures in the way mutexes and guard interfaces work, it's use of date-time 
> types for clock/timing interfaces and such.  At this point I feel it would be 
> very important to have a reference implementation widely available to Boosters 
> and others to play with so that any issues are shaken out while there's still 
> time tweak things.  Howard has been maintaining a reference implementation, 
> but this is a call out to the broader thread development team (not sure who 
> all that is now besides Anthony) to consider how we might formalize this into 
> Boost.threads.
>
> Thoughts?

The boost thread team is pretty much just me at the moment, though there's a
reasonable level of interest from others (such as Peter Dimov).

I'm trying to update trunk to be have more of the C++0x interface at the
moment. I've already integrated call_once (though I forgot only MSVC has
_ReadWriteBarrier, and I haven't done the variadic arguments yet), and I'm
currently working on the mutexes. I'm keen to get everything updated as much
as possible before the 1.35 cutoff. I've got a reasonably up-to-date Windows
implementation to use as a basis, and I've been working through the POSIX
stuff.

Also, even though it's been punted to TR2, I want to get the read-write mutex
back in --- I have a new implementation, and it's been missing since 1.32, so
it would be good to get it back in the relese.

Anthony
-- 
Anthony Williams
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