----- Mensaje original ----- De: "Julio M. Merino Vidal" <jmmv84@gmail.com> Fecha: Miércoles, Agosto 16, 2006 5:31 pm Asunto: [boost] Presentation of Boost.Process (SoC project)
Hello,
During the past two-three months Jeff Garland (as mentor) and I have been working on the Boost Summer of Code project whose goal was to implement a library to spawn and manage child processes. A little introduction and a link to the source code can be found here:
https://www.boost-consulting.com:8443/trac/soc/wiki/process
But you'll probably want to go straight to the documentation which includes, among many other information, a couple of tutorials and multiple examples. I'm keeping an up-to-date snapshot at the following URL:
http://www.NetBSD.org/~jmmv/process/
If it wasn't for the imminent SoC deadline (next Monday), I wouldn't present it just yet because there are still a couple of important issues that I would like to see resolved as soon as possible:
First is the lack of a "design decisions" chapter in the documentation. This is not an extremely big issue because the Wiki page linked above already contains many discussions on the library's current design. In other words, that chapter will end up summarizing the information in there and adding few new things.
Second, and very important, is the "need" to integrate the library with Boost.Asio to allow asynchronous management of communication streams and process termination. Unfortunately it does not support such asynchronous events yet, and integrating with Boost.Asio sounds like a reasonable approach to cover this area.
Anyway, I wouldn't like this to discourage you from taking a look at the documentation and code. The library is already big enough to let you get a general idea on its focus and design. You can start criticising now! ;-) Sincerely, any constructive comments will be certainly appreciated.
Thank you.
Hello Julio, A cursory look at the docs shows this can be a very valuable contribution to Boost. Thank you for your effort! Although I plan to give a thorough review during the next week, let me advance a few issues: 1. The lib provides functionality to spawn child processes and examine them through launcher and child classes, respectively. Yet, it seems to lack functionality to examine the *current* process. In particular, it looks like one cannot get the handle_type of the current process (Win32:GetCurrentProcessID) in a manner compatible with child::get_handle. Would it be feasible to extend the lib to support this? In case it would, maybe it'd be a good idea then to rename "child" to a neutral "process", for instance, so that process classes are returned by laucher as well as by some potential "current_process" facility. 2. Would it be safe to guarantee that handle_type is an integral type? It is so at least for POSIX and Win32. This would allow the programmer to output handle_type's to std::ostreams's (for tracing purposes, for instance) and to use handle_type's in a number of scenarios, vg to store them in STL data structures. Joaquín M López Muñoz Telefónica, Investigación y Desarollo