Re: [boost] [afio] Formal review of Boost.AFIO

Subject: Re: [boost] [afio] Formal review of Boost.AFIO
From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-08-31 10:30:27

On 30 Aug 2015 at 19:46, Glen Fernandes wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 30, 2015, Gruenke,Matt wrote:
> > This obviously isn't a proper review, and shouldn't be counted as such.
> > Rather, I pose a question to other reviewers: for how many of you does
> > this actually solve a problem you've faced or anticipate?  For me, the
> > answer is "no".  Otherwise, I'd invest further time in a proper review.
> 
> This is exactly what I feel. The answer is "no" for me too. This is
> also the reason why I haven't submitted a formal review.
> 
> I was interested in Boost having an asynchronous file I/O library and
> was looking forward to reviewing AFIO because of all the discussion on
> the list previously about performance. What I was expecting was also a
> portable abstraction over platform specific APIs like KAIO or
> overlapped I/O.

Linux KAIO is a remarkably useless async i/o API, at least to Linux 
kernel 3.2 on ext4 which was the last I tested. It was no better than 
a thread pool. This is why I have been in no rush to add support.

The Windows IOCP backend does deliver significant benefits, IF you 
restructure your algorithms to fit.

Niall

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