[Boost-users] [Review] Shmem library review results

From: Fred Bertsch (fred.bertsch_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-02-17 12:49:04

Hello everyone,

The formal review of Ion Gaztañaga's Shmem library ended yesterday. I
am pleased to announce that it was accepted into Boost! This library
clearly generated a lot of interest from people since we got quite a
few reviews. All of them were positive. During the discussion, some
weaknesses in the library were found, and Ion has agreed to correct
them.

These include:

-	Improvements to the documentation and example code.

-	Clearer documentation on which header files to include for which objects.

-	Removing the 2-phase construction mechanism and replacing them with
RAII-only constructors.

-	Adding !is_polymorphic static asserts when inserting an object into
shared memory.

Several difficult issues were raised during the review that will not
be solved immediately. These include:

-	Security information about the shared memory object is currently avoided.

-	The synchronization objects have some weaknesses. Some of these
weaknesses are related to the same weaknesses in Boost.Threads.

-	Memory mapped file regions are not separate from memory mapped files
in the current implementation.

-	Multi-segment shared memory that would allow the shared memory object to grow.

Perhaps these issues could be dealt with in a future version.

Thank you, everyone, for the reviews and discussions about Shmem. This
library should be extremely useful to those doing IPC.

-Fred Bertsch