on Thu Sep 04 2008, "Giovanni Piero Deretta" <gpderetta-AT-gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 7:21 PM, David Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> wrote:
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.
Good points, all. Thanks, -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com