On Thursday 12 February 2004 08:15 pm, scott wrote:
but that is somewhat convenient. i dont have any real case for not building on top of boost::threads. i would wonder about losing touch with the available threading primitives. its hard enough making it work without having to work through an intermediary. but hiding the specifics of threads is a major benefit of boost::threads so i will (head down) look into this.
the result wouldnt be an "alternate" model though :-)
From the programmer's perspective, it is an alternative model: you don't need to show them the threads underneath, you just need to show them the high-level interface.
Here's the rub: I'm interested. The problem is that I don't want this library lost because it needs to be implemented for Posix, and Windows, and Mac, and we tend to be rather skeptical about platform-specific libraries :)
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 was not referring to UML actors, but to a model for (distributed) computation.
was there some specific aspect of alt-threads that needed elaboration (yeah, like everything :-) or were you suggesting a new direction for me to check out?
Well, you might be interested in this: http://www.cs.rpi.edu/courses/spring03/dci/actor-semantics.pdf It describes the actor model of computation, which I think you might be interested in. Doug