Re: [boost] [afio] AFIO review postponed till Monday

Subject: Re: [boost] [afio] AFIO review postponed till Monday
From: Glen Fernandes (glen.fernandes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-07-21 20:07:10

Hi Niall,

> Short answer: Sadly I believe not. I was unhappy with the tutorial in the documentation.

Ah; I see.

I hope you're not making this harder on yourself than it needs to be.
Perhaps I need to understand better: You must have felt the library
was functionally stable and maybe even fit for production code at some
point (because it was in the review queue for long time), right?. At
some point in the last year you decided on a major update (i.e.
involving the "lightweight future promises" you mentioned) that alter
the interface dramatically, that would require updating the tutorial
and documentation. Without going into too much detail about that
change: Does it significantly make using AFIO easier? Does it
significantly improve AFIO  performance?

> All that said, apart from the tutorial any early observations about anything within https://boostgsoc13.github.io/boost.afio/ are welcome.

Some notes from a brief first glance at the code yesterday:

1. I might be mistaken, but are you using undocumented NT APIs for the
Windows specific implementation? I was under the impression that you
wanted AFIO to be used in production code; i.e. this is intended to be
a more practical library than an experimental one. I'm surprised the
use of undocumented APIs has not backfired yet in your testing.

2. Examples are a little alarming: If an example in the documentation
contain #ifdef WIN32 or #ifdef __FreeBSD__, it makes someone wonder
how portable AFIO really is. Your examples should not make using the
library look complicated by being longer than they need to be: If they
contain #if 0 blocks, they are just that much harder to read.

Glen