Re: [boost] [process] Formal review results

Subject: Re: [boost] [process] Formal review results
From: Gavin Lambert (gavinl_at_[hidden])
Date: 2016-11-09 17:26:47

On 10/11/2016 09:00, Klemens Morgenstern wrote:
> That did however allow one additional feature: with the pipe
> automatically closing, you can now use a part of the asio stuff with
> bp::spawn.
>
> asio::io_service ios;
> std::future<std::string> fut;
> bp::spawn("foo", std_out > fut, ios);
>
> Not sure this is the smartest thing to do, but it could make sense for
> some simple applications.

That's quite nice, actually -- a large number of applications would just 
want to pull the complete output from a process, either with no input or 
with completely provided input.  It's probably less common to need to 
hold an interactive conversation, so having a nice quick syntax that 
hides the stream/pipe work internally is a pretty good win.

Having said that, is there an inverse of this for providing the complete 
input?  Presumably std_in < std::string(x) can't work, as this would be 
confused with a filename.  (And while wrapping it in a future is 
possible, it'd be a bit silly.)

This sort of thing kinda makes me wish that the originally proposed 
future_stream survived into Boost or the standard.  Though you can 
simulate one with a composite future (a future that returns a value and 
a new future); I have an implementation kicking around somewhere.  It's 
not the prettiest of things nor would it be a simple drop-in though, I 
think.