On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 14:15:19 +1300, scott wrote
very briefly, the boost model treats threads as a resource (fair enough to :-) and submits code fragments for asynchronous execution. in the alternate model, threads come about as a consequence of instantiating final (a la java) objects. the distinguishing attribute being that threads only run code that is "part of themselves" rather than code being submitted from "outside". execution of the code is initiated by sending of a message (within my vocabulary that is actually a signal). the message can contain arbitrary data.
This reminds me of the actor model of distributed computation. If you are familiar with actors, could you briefly compare/contrast your approach against them?
i know of uml's actor but not sure if that's the same thing. and my knowledge of uml is so lame i suspect i shouldnt attempt any analogies.
I believe you'all are talking about 'Active Objects'. Doug Schmidt, primary author of ACE, has written extensively on this subject. Take a look at this paper: http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/lavender96active.html ACE has direct support for the paradigm. It's been a couple years since I looked at it, but as I recall using a bunch of template magic object methods are morphed into stubs that queue messages for the object thus disconnecting the requesting thread from the execution of the method. Jeff