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

From: Jeff Garland (jeff_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-10-08 11:20:40

Anthony Williams wrote:
> 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.

Not really -- it's just hard.  I'd rather have it correct and consistent with 
the rest of the standard. Point is that unless something goes horribly 
off-track during the refinements the wording will be in the standard prior to 
the Feb 08 meeting in Bellevue.

>> 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.

Ok, that sounds good, although are you going to maintain a 'classic' interface 
for existing users?  Given the changes in the interface going straight from 
the current boost.thread to 0x interfaces would require some client rework. 
One thought would be to put the new stuff in namespace c++0x or std?

I have a draft implementation of the date-time types you need -- I think 
Howard has been distributing that as well -- it needs some update because we 
made some name changes.  I don't know that I want to incorporate directly into 
Boost date-time just yet, so maybe we want to put it in thread for now? 
Anyway, I'll contact you off-list and so we can figure out the details.

One other thing I forgot about was the atomics stuff -- that was voted in as 
is.  Is anyone working on a Boost implementation of that stuff?  I know there 
is some of this floating around in shared ptr or something.

Jeff