Without more information it'd be hard to say. Are you familiar with Boost ASIO? It's a common method of handling asynchronous communication, though how much it can be used in your situation may depend on the particular hardware interface.

The typical situation for a single-threaded process is to set up an executor context, maybe set up signal handlers, then make an asynchronous call using ASIO's objects. When making the asynchronous calls, you provide a callback function object. Your callback function object may then make another request during its processing. ASIO handles the under-the-hood abstraction (and generally simplifies it for most situations). But it's up to you to ensure that your call sequence is safe: for example ASIO will not prevent you from making multiple simultaneous writes to the same file descriptor despite it being unsafe in many situations.

My understanding is that your callback is placed onto a function queue rather than called directly (contrast to POSIX signals where the OS interrupts whatever function is running right now). That can hurt your response performance if you're doing long-running tasks so it's worth considering.

On Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 12:03 PM Tim Burgess via Boost-users <boost-users@lists.boost.org> wrote:

Hi,

I’m trying to find a method of solving the problem detailed below using Boost (or an alternative:

1 – I have to send a series of messages to a hardware device to query its internal parameter values at application load-time. This I can do;

2 – I have a callback that receives responses from the hardware, though I get some replies go missing due to saturation;
3
The hardware manufacturer tells me that I should send 1 query then wait for the response before sending the next query. I could use Sleep, but this depends on a specific wait time and I’m not sure if it suspends all processing, including my callback, so this doesn’t look satisfactory.
What I’m looking for is a “wait until response” kind of thing, but I haven’t found such a thing so far, though I have found several wait routines for handling multiple threads.

I’d appreciate any guidance as to what to look for, as my searches are obviously not asking the right questions.

Best wishes.

Tim Burgess
Raised Bar Ltd.
E: tim@raisedbar.net
M: +44 (0)7989 486976

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