Re: [boost] Synapse library review starts today December 2

Subject: Re: [boost] Synapse library review starts today December 2
From: Gavin Lambert (gavinl_at_[hidden])
Date: 2016-12-04 22:25:10

On 5/12/2016 11:51, Robert McInnis wrote:
> I disagree with this design style, which is to say I also disagree with the
> existing slot/signal style.
>
> As an example, what if we had a system with hundreds of thousands of
> numerics... each with a particular
> name.  Then imagine a rule set that had to maintain integrity as any
> particular numeric were to be
> changed.  With slots or synapses, you're forced to search for the object
> each time before applying the
> rules.  This would bog down quickly as the number of updates per second
> increased (imagine 100k objects
> and 2-10k entwined rules being updated 2k times per second.  That's a real
> world scenario)

The slot/signal model is the same as the observer model, it's just that 
your observers happen to implement one signal "changed" on all objects 
instead of defining different signals for different purposes.

Instance-based signals like you're talking about are what Signals2 does. 
  It has the benefit of callbacks being stored locally, at the cost of 
being intrusive (the object raising the signal needs to contain the 
signal instance).

This library takes the other approach of being non-intrusive and storing 
the signal implementations elsewhere -- the benefit is that you can have 
objects emit signals on behalf of other objects that don't need to know 
that the signalling framework exists, but comes with some performance 
costs as a result.

Some use cases would naturally lend itself to one, while others would 
lend itself to the other.  If all of the code is controlled by you then 
using Signals2 probably makes more sense, since it's trivial to include 
the signals in your own classes and it gives you better performance (in 
theory -- YMMV with mutexes).

But Klemens is asserting that there are some cases where the alternate 
design is more useful; while I can't think of any such cases I've 
personally encountered, I have little doubt that they could exist and as 
such a library that supports it could be useful.