Thomas Stevens <thomathoma69@yahoo.com> writes:
Hi, forgive me for my ignorance but I'm a boost newbie...
The rationale document for boost::fsm states that the library should meet a number of requirements, numbered from 1 to 9. Especially, the sixth requirement says "support the development of arbitrarily large and complex state machines.".
Ok, this may be good - I guess it is in fact good. But I'm a bit anxious that this implies that the library is therefore not suitable for enviroments where no unnecessary overhead is acceptable, like in many embedded applications.
However, the seventh requirement indicates that my worries are unjustified since it reads: "allow the user to customize all resource management so that the library could be used for applications with hard real-time requirements".
And further down the Rationale document one can read a section on the Resource usage of Memory which looks good.
So, just to be sure, is boost::fsm suitable for the development of embedded applications where constraints such as memory footprint is an issue? (Hopefully, someone can answer this based on the experience of using the library or by knowing the code - not by reading the documentation (like me ;-)).
Thomas, That is a concern of mine, too. You might be interested in http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/100599 and http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/100637, which has the attachments announced in the earlier message. These FSM frameworks have minimal overhead, suitable for embedded systems. They also have fewer features (so far) than Andreas' design does. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting http://www.boost-consulting.com