"Jeff Garland" <jeff@crystalclearsoftware.com> writes:
On Thu, 5 Feb 2004 09:20:09 -0500, Bennett, Patrick wrote
Honestly, I'd suggest you just use ACE for threading/synchronization primitives. It's available for a large number of platforms and is heavily used and frequently updated.
All true.
I like Boost a lot, but I think some people are trying to make Boost more than (IMO) it should be. People discussing efficient io dispatch techniques for example would be better served to just use ACE, which already does many of these things extremely well. (http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html)
I say that it depends. If you need networking, threading, event loops, etc, in C++ right now then yes, by all means you need to look at ACE. That said, ACE is a huge library that is reasonably difficult to learn and that suffers from it's own legacy. That legacy includes a long list of platforms, compilers, and standard libraries that don't even come close to standard C++. As a result ACE's code base is a macro nightmare and it doesn't utilize the standard library as much as I'd like to see (it was around pre-standard library).
ACE is also a dependency nightmare. If you want any of those components, you have to link the whole enormous ACE library into your application. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com