Am 14.02.2011 16:45, schrieb Klaim - Joël Lamotte:
As far as I know, from a previous discussion on this list, async_wait might be the only (cross-platform) way (without having to add another dependency than boost to the project...) to achive the last point, knowing when the child process ends.
Do you mean with async_wait the feature dealing with SIGCHLD and sigwait()? If so it is not cross-platform. As discussed in this thread waiting on signals asynchronously influences the application and other libs - see installing signal handlers. IMHO waiting on signals (SIGCHLD, SIGTERM, SIGSTOP, SIGUSR1, ...) should be implemented in a separate library.
About the "thread and future + sync. waiting" way of doing it : would it work with any kind of child process end (including any kind of crash)? Or is it part of the limitations you're thinking about?
Yes - waitpid( child_pid, ...) blocking in one separate thread - returning the result in a future. Depending on how many threads are created blocking in waitpid it may reduce the performance (at least at some amount of threads the scheduling overhead may become significant).
About the initial question, I've always thought that Boost.Process would provide : 1. A cross-platform way to manipulate processes (child processes) including managing their "life-time".
'Managing life-time' means stop, continue, kill children?
2. Maybe some platform-specific utilites. 3. Easy Inter-process communication "would be cool" but as there is another library providing this feature, is not a show stopper for me.
boost.asio/boost.interprocess