Re: [Boost-users] boost coroutine status

OvermindDL1 wrote:

On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Nat Goodspeed wrote:

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Nat Goodspeed wrote:

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Robert Ramey wrote:

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Any chance the package in the vault could be updated with these patches?. Would it be possible to include the html version of the documentation in the package in the vault as well?

Let's try that again: http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=boost-coroutine-2009-04-30.tar.gz&directory=Concurrent%20Programming&

As soon as I #included coroutine headers in a second .cpp file on Windows, I ended up with duplicate-symbol link errors. Maybe Giovanni Deretta hadn't gotten beyond single-source test programs. Fortunately the fix was straightforward.

I looked at this library a few years ago before I wrote my own (for a windows system), and the big problem I saw with it was that it uses fibers on windows. Fibers have this little problem, if you say you need, say, 20kb for the fiber stack, it still allocates as much memory as a thread uses (4megs by default I think), meaning if you try to create 10k of these little buggers, you run out of memory well before that. Made this library rather worthless for my use. If it really wants to be used for a good coroutine based paradigm, then they need to get rid of the fiber usage on the win32 side.

I have also got the package running on my Windows/XP system. Here is a summary of my experience and impressions. a) Overall, this is a very good start. Good tutorial, lots of examples and tests. It worked in my environment without problem. b) I was unsuccessful in getting bjam to build the package or its documentation. I would expect that a boost.build guru could fix that up in short order. When I looked into this, I found that there was only one compiled module. I made a tweak so that this was implemente in a header so the boost build problem went away for me - at least for the library build. I would expect that a similar tweak could be done for other platforms thus making it a header only library. This package isn't quite ready for boost, but it's way too good not to finish. Here is what is needed. a) Needs reference documentation. b) Formal review Here is a set of enhancements which would be welcome: a) implemention of the coroutine switch for other platforms. Currenlty linux and windows are implemented. b) a possible alternative implemenation of coroutine switch for windows which doesn't depend on fibers. I have one that I've used for many years. Of course it's in assembler. I'm sure this is doable. c) I would like to see the lower level implemenation selectable at compile time between different implementations - including one based on threads so that one would have the same interface for a multi-threading/multicore environment. Of course this would need someone commited to do all this. But there would be a lot of glory for this since the package described above would be a boost "best seller". Robert Ramey