February 2006 - Boost-announce - lists.preview.boost.org

[Review] Shmem library review results
by Fred Bertsch 17 Feb '06

17 Feb '06

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

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[Review] Shmem Library
by Fred Bertsch 06 Feb '06

06 Feb '06

Hello everyone, The review of the proposed Boost Shmem library written by Ion Gaztañaga starts today (February 6th, 2006) and ends after 10 days (February 16, 2006). Documentation for the library can be found online here: http://tinyurl.com/e2os3 Both documentation and the library itself can be downloaded here: http://tinyurl.com/9t5qy --------------------------------------------------- About the library: The Shmem Library simplifies the use of shared memory and provides some STL compatible allocators that allow shared memory STL container placement. It also offers helper classes, such as offset pointers, process shared mutexes, condition variables, and named semaphores. Library users can apply all STL algorithms and utilities with created shared memory objects. Shmem also wants to present a portable implementation, unifying UNIX and Windows shared memory object creation, providing simple wrapper classes. Shmem offers the following to the user: - Portable synchronization primitives for shared memory, including shared mutexes and shared condition variables. - Dynamic allocation of portions of a shared memory segment. - Named allocation in shared memory. Shmem can create objects in shared memory and associate it with a c-string offering a similar mechanism to a named new/delete. Created object can be found by other processes using Shmem framework. - Offset pointers that can be safely placed in shared memory to point to another object of the same shared memory segment even if the memory is mapped to a different address. - STL compatible shared memory allocators so that STL containers can be placed in shared memory. Shmem also offers a pooled node allocator to save and optimize shared memory allocation in node containers. - STL compatible containers for systems with STL implementations that cannot deal with shared memory. The user can map shared memory to different addresses and use STL compatible containers and algorithms. Useful to store common data or implement shared memory databases. These containers also show how STL compatible containers can make use of shared memory STL compatible allocators to place such containers in the shared memory. Shmem also offers the basic_string pseudo-container to use full-powered C++ strings in shared memory. --------------------------------------------------- Please always state in your review, whether you think the library should be accepted as a Boost library! Additionally please consider giving feedback on the following general topics: - What is your evaluation of the design? - What is your evaluation of the implementation? - What is your evaluation of the documentation? - What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library? - Did you try to use the library? With what compiler? Did you have any problems? - How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A quick reading? In-depth study? - Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain? Fred Bertsch Review Manager

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[Review] Fixed strings library
by Hartmut Kaiser 05 Feb '06

05 Feb '06

Hi all, the formal review period of the Fixed strings library written by Reece Dunn ends today. Since there was complete consent with regard to this library among all submitted reviews, it is straight forward for me to make the final decision. The library is rejected and will not be included into Boost at this point in time. The main points listed during review were: - Do we need a fixed_string library at all, is it worth the overhead? - Insufficient/confusing documentation . insufficient description of general design, design rationales and motivations . it says more about implementation details rather then the public interface . missing or insufficient documentation of parts of the library - The overall architecture of the implementation is too complicated and needs to be reworked - Missing interface for construction/interaction with std::string's - Unclear benefit to have the strings truncated to avoid overflows - Missing performance comparison with std::string and other alternatives - Compilation problems with the library as submitted for review Reece already expressed his interest to resubmit the library for review again, after he has been able to address the mention issues. I'ld like to thank Reece for submitting this library and all reviewers for their time they invested in preparing the reviews. Regards Hartmut Review Manager

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