Dean Michael Berris wrote:
Hi everyone,
I'm working on a project right now which uses both Boost.Asio and Boost.Thread along with a lot of other Boost libraries. We've pretty much had to roll our own Active Object implementation everytime we need asynchronous method invocation, and I understand that Futures are being proposed for C++0x.
The question would be whether there will be (or whether there already is) a "generic" active object implementation? We've found that Boost.Asio's io_service is a good scheduler/queue and using a futures wrapper for the result types.
Perhaps something that used some preprocessor magic or with some TMP ?
Insights and pointers will be most appreciated.
In the coroutine library I've developed as part of the summer of code, I've used futures to represent asynchronous function invocations, that is the result of an asynchronous computations , not necessarily concurrent. Every computation whose result can be delivered using an asio io_service can be represented by a future. This model can very well be used to represent active objects, in fact asio sort of already does that: the resolver service can be considered an active object (it uses a worker thread to run the actual resolver), and a future can be used to wait for the result of an async_resolve function. These futures are tightly bound to coroutines (i.e. you can use them only from inside a coroutine), and they might or might not fit in your existing design. When a coroutine wait for a future, control is relinquished to the io_service that can do other work. About preprocessor and TMP magic, I'm using some of it to have futures be able to handle any number and types result types (for example an async_write returns a future<error_type, std::size_t>. While the road to a full active object is long, may be my library is a good start. BTW, coroutines might be a much better way, performance-wise, to implement Active Objects with one thread per object or a thread pool. You can look at the code and see if it fits your need here: https://www.boost-consulting.com:8443/trac/soc/browser/boost/soc/2006/corout... docs here: http://www.crystalclearsoftware.com/soc/coroutine/index.html Currently real life prevent me from cleaning up the library for a boost review request, but plan to do it short term. HTH, -- Giovanni P. Deretta