Re: [boost] Futures

Subject: Re: [boost] Futures
From: Andreas Schäfer (gentryx_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-01-15 09:10:34

Hey Niall,

On 13:33 Thu 15 Jan     , Niall Douglas wrote:
> To be honest, C code only needs the ability to compose waits, that's 
> the frustrating part because C++ is all up itself with no regard to 
> others.

I realize the value of being able to call C++ functions from C code.
I'm skeptical though about designing C++ libraries so that they can
export features which simply don't exist in C, if that complicates the
design.

> For example, if a promise-future could toggle the signalled 
> state of a file descriptor, that would enable C code to run a 
> select() composure where the C code waits on "something to happen", 
> which includes a C++ future becoming set.

Wouldn't it be an acceptable workaround to have a wrapper for futures,
written in C++, which can signal a FD once the future is ready?
Pulling such functionality into the API of C++ futures doesn't look clean
for me, especially since there are loads of use cases where a context
switch is prohibitively slow.

Another workaround would be to require users to compile the C function
which needs to compose the waits with a C compiler.

> FYI the pthreads permit object I wrote has the optional facility to 
> signal a fd when it goes signalled, so a permit object based future 
> would be very useful to C code.

Again, this depends on the use case. In HPC the time a system call
takes is considered millennia. Consider the case when hardware is
programmed by mapping memory directly into the address space of a user
level program.

Cheers
-Andreas

-- 
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Andreas Schäfer
HPC and Grid Computing
Chair of Computer Science 3
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
[phone]
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