Re: [boost] [netlib] 0.8-beta now available!

Subject: Re: [boost] [netlib] 0.8-beta now available!
From: Cliff Green (cliffg_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-11-15 12:30:31

From: "Bruno Santos" <bsantos_at_[hidden]>
> The thread pool is a BAD IDEA. I'm very interested in your library, I
> would like to use it with other async services I have implemented using
> Boost Asio. For this a need to specify which io_service your library is
> going to use and no threads whatsoever. I like the idea of boost Asio,
> having a single io_service where I can put as many threads to run as I
> would like (this would usually be a number of threads equal to the
> number of cores).

I agree completely. I'm writing some thin "middle-ware" networking libraries 
and the threading (single, pool, etc) is left completely up to the higher 
layers. The constructors either use an internal io_service, or take an 
io_service by reference, allowing (if desired) the same io_service to be 
shared among multiple (other) libraries.

There's too many libraries that encapsulate a whole threading subsystem, but 
one of the beauties of Asio is that it decouples networking from the 
threading strategy, and I would hope a good, general-use HTTP library would 
allow the same (in particular, one of the use cases I would expect a good 
general-use HTTP library to support is embedded systems with small 
footprints and minimal or no threading - I haven't looked at netlib in a 
while, so don't know how closely the HTTP portions meet this goal).

Cliff