Thanks to everyone for the excellent reviews and discussions of asio! Some folks want additional time for the asio review, so the review will be extended until Dec 30th. Note that Chrisopher may not be able to respond to posts during a significant part of this time due to holiday commitments, but the feedback will eventually be addressed and discussed. In the way of reminder, here's the library details again: Today (Dec 22nd) is the first continuation of the formal review of the Asynchronous I/O library (asio) library by Christopher Kohlhoff. The review will run be extended until Friday December 30th. I will be serving as review manager. From the library synopsis: Boost.Asio is a cross-platform C++ library for network programming that provides developers with a consistent asynchronous I/O model using a modern C++ approach. Downloads of the library as well as online documentation can be found at: http://asio.sourceforge.net/ http://asio.sourceforge.net/boost-asio-proposal-0.3.6/libs/asio/doc/ As usual, please state in review comments how you reviewed the library and whether the you think the library should be accepted into Boost. Further guidelines for writing reviews can be found on the website at: http://www.boost.org/more/formal_review_process.htm#Comments Please review early and often! Thanks, Jeff ******************************************************* A Few Library Details: ******************************************************* Supported Platforms The following platforms and compilers have been tested: * Win32 using Visual C++ 7.1 and Visual C++ 8.0. * Win32 using Borland C++Builder 6 patch 4. * Win32 using MinGW. * Linux (2.4 or 2.6 kernels) using g++ 3.3 or later. * Solaris using g++ 3.3 or later. * Mac OS X 10.4 using g++ 3.3 or later. Rationale The Boost.Asio library is intended for programmers using C++ for systems programming, where access to operating system functionality such as networking is often required. In particular, Boost.Asio attempts to address the following goals: * Portability. The library should support, and provide consistent behaviour across, a range of commonly used operating systems. * Scalability. The library should allow, and indeed encourage, the development of network applications that scale to hundreds or thousands of concurrent connections. The library implementation for each operating system should use the mechanism that best enables this scalability. * Efficiency. The library should support techniques such as scatter-gather I/O, and allow protocol implementations that minimise data copying. * Model Berkeley sockets. The Berkeley sockets API is widely implemented and understood, as well as being covered in much literature. Other programming languages often use a similar interface for networking APIs. * Ease of use. Lower the entry barrier for new users by taking a toolkit, rather than framework, approach. That is, try to minimise the up-front investment in time to just learning a few basic rules and guidelines. After that, a library user should only need to understand the specific functions that are being used. * Basis for further abstraction. The library should permit the development of other libraries that provide higher levels of abstraction. For example, implementations of commonly used protocols such as HTTP. Although the current incarnation of Boost.Asio focuses primarily on networking, its concepts of asynchronous I/O can be extended to include other operating system resources such as files.