Re: [boost] [Fibers] Performance

Subject: Re: [boost] [Fibers] Performance
From: Bjorn Reese (breese_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-01-16 11:19:10

On 01/16/2014 01:51 PM, Giovanni Piero Deretta wrote:

> I think that Harmut point is that you can very well use threads for the
> same thing. In this particular case you would just perform a syncronous
> read. Yes, to mantain the same level of concurrency you need to spawn ten

Let me add two use cases that cannot be handled reasonably that way.

First, many third-party libraries have callbacks as their primary
interaction mechanism, and unlike Asio, they do not provide a
synchronous alternative for the interaction. In this case fibers can
be of great help.

Second, when decoding/parsing streaming data (data that is received
piecemeal) that is separated by delimiters, you have to start decoding
to see if you have received the delimiter. If not, then you have to
receive more data and decode again. Rather than having to decode from
the beginning every time, it is preferable to remember how far you got
and continue from there. This can be done by integrating fibers with
the decoder.

In these use cases performance is of secondary importance.