On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 7:21 PM, David Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> wrote:
on Thu Sep 04 2008, "Stjepan Rajko" <stipe-AT-asu.edu> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 6:51 AM, David Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> wrote:
I am not really an expert on what you'd use such a library for It seems like compile-time configurability is of much greater interest in general for problems you'd approach with dataflow, especially if you are using a DSEL to describe the system. In other words, when you actually *need* runtime configurability you'd probably want a graphical front-end or something, and the syntax of making connections in C++ wouldn't matter much. Am I missign something?
You're right - in fact I already put together a proof-of-concept editor which can be used with any framework that has a Dataflow library support layer.
Okay, but which applications need runtime configurability? Would not the performance advantages of a compile-time structure be more valuable than the flexibility of runtime configuration in most applications?
Distributed applications could be a good use case. If you have your components on different machines, you can't take advantage of compile-time structure anyways. Even for normal applications it is often very useful to be able to reorganize your pipeline without a recompile, at least for coarse grained components, where the benefit of static checking and optimization might be less important. In particular, the ability to add or remove sink and sources, or disabling optional components, is very useful. -- gpd