Re: [boost] [review] Dataflow Library

Subject: Re: [boost] [review] Dataflow Library
From: Giovanni Piero Deretta (gpderetta_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-09-04 13:51:07

On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 7:21 PM, David Abrahams <dave_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> on Thu Sep 04 2008, "Stjepan Rajko" <stipe-AT-asu.edu> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 6:51 AM, David Abrahams <dave_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>>
>>> I am not really an expert on what you'd use such a library for It seems
>>> like compile-time configurability is of much greater interest in general
>>> for problems you'd approach with dataflow, especially if you are using a
>>> DSEL to describe the system.  In other words, when you actually *need*
>>> runtime configurability you'd probably want a graphical front-end or
>>> something, and the syntax of making connections in C++ wouldn't matter
>>> much.  Am I missign something?
>>>
>>
>> You're right - in fact I already put together a proof-of-concept
>> editor which can be used with any framework that has a Dataflow
>> library support layer.
>
> Okay, but which applications need runtime configurability?  Would not
> the performance advantages of a compile-time structure be more valuable
> than the flexibility of runtime configuration in most applications?
>

Distributed applications could be a good use case. If you have your
components on different machines, you can't take advantage of
compile-time structure anyways.

Even for normal applications it is often very useful to be able to
reorganize your pipeline without a recompile, at least for coarse
grained components, where the benefit of static checking and
optimization might be less important. In particular, the ability to
add or remove sink and sources, or disabling optional components, is
very useful.

-- 
gpd