[boost.async] Some questions

From: Andrzej Krzemienski (akrzemi1_at_[hidden])
Date: 2023-08-13 09:32:50

Hi Everyone,
I would like to thank Klemens for writing and sharing this library. I am
sure the community needs a higher level library for asynchronous
computations based on C++20 coroutines. Boost.Async addresses the need. I
would like to ask a couple of questions to better understand the design
goals and the scope of the library.

Q1. Is single-threaded-ness the design goal? Or is the plan to enable
multi-threaded use cases? There is a GitHub issue (
https://github.com/klemens-morgenstern/async/issues/19) suggesting the
latter.

Q2. Reading through the docs, I get an impression that Boost.Async is
"Either a wrapper over ASIO, or an isolated usage for a generator". They
seem like two unrelated worlds. The former requires a hard prerequisite of
having a Boost.ASIO library (with Boost version at least 1.82). The latter
can hardly be called "asynchronous". Generators, the way I understand them,
are perfectly synchronous. Is this impression correct?

The following are more remarks regarding the choice of names.

Q3. The docs say that `promise` and `task` differ primarily by their level
of eagerness. But the names do not seem to reflect this. What is the
rationale or the intuition behind those names?

R1. I find the name `use_op` uninformative. The examples in documentation
suggest that it is an *adapter*: they change the Boost.ASIO interface into
the Boost.Async interface. Is that correct?

Regards,
&rzej;