Re: [boost] [future] Early draft of wait for multiple futures interface

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-06-02 13:34:44

Johan Torp:
> Interesting way of putting it. I was hoping we could do better than the
> second interface, that futures could solve a lot of the problems which are
> associated with that approach;
> - Exception propagation, as you pointed out
> - It does not allow detection that there are not futures associated with a
> particular promise, which has been proposed.
> - You need to handle safe and threadsafe shutdown from within the "done"
> callback, if the future-listening thread wants to terminate before the
> active object
> - It also suffers from all of the problem with moving functors/code from 
> one
> thread to another. See my arguments regarding executing foreign thread's
> code at:
> http://www.nabble.com/-future--Early-draft-of-wait-for-multiple-futures-interface-to17242880.html
> I guess most done-callbacks will be thin wrappers which does minimal 
> things
> like posting a message containing the value but the problems are still
> there.

There's no question that the future-based interface can be safer and more 
convenient. But this doesn't necessarily make it "the" low-level interface 
on top of which one can (or must) express all other interfaces.

The callback-based interface, on the other hand, can be difficult to use, 
but both future-based and message-based interfaces can be built upon it.

A future-based interface built on top of a callback interface doesn't seem 
to suffer from the deficiencies you list, and neither does a message-based 
interface (given an appropriately powerful and robust message-passing 
framework in which to express it.)