Hi Caleb, I'll try to address both topics since they are mushed together (as in, I'm not sure they are independent questions after all<g>).

Not sure what you mean here. Connections may be either synchronous or asynchronous? This seems too limiting IMHO.

I meant "the connection process", not the whole object. :) All activities have sync/async forms and I/O methods also have non-blocking. See the sandbox, network.zip/network.html for details. http://boost-sandbox.sourceforge.net/vault

Some of these are semi-portable (e.g. select, poll) but the others are very specific to the platform. As a user I want the ability to choose the one that is most suitable to the task at hand.

From my perspective, understanding network concepts is hard enough for novices. I really believe that we would be best served by a

I'm not sure I understand "suitable to the task at hand". By this do you mean: "I'm writing a simple app that makes a single stream connection" vs. "I'm writing a server that accepts 10,000 connections"? That kind of task? If so, this doesn't sound like an argument for epoll vs. select vs. kqueue. It rather sounds like a desire for the interface to make simple things simple and hard things possible. In other words, why should one care "how" operations are accomplished? It sounds akin to the user selecting Windows API CreateFile flags when opening an ifstream. As soon as we start down this path, the user must code to platform-specific behaviors and interfaces. Exposing such details, IMHO, is a big problem for the user for no benefit that I can see (yet? <g>). I believe that instead of chosing between say epoll and kqueue, the user should chose to block or get callbacks, etc.. I would suggest that for any given platform, there is a best/good_enough choice that would shield the user from these non-portable concerns. If the mechanism seems important, perhaps being involved in the implementation of the interface for a given platform would address these concerns? portable, clean abstraction of these primitives that provides synchronous and asynchronous forms of all time consuming operations, and non-blocking I/O. Other concerns, IMHO, are implementation details. Best regards, Don --- Caleb Epstein <caleb.epstein@gmail.com> wrote:

On Apr 12, 2005 12:17 AM, Don G <dongryphon@yahoo.com> wrote:

...

1. Should the network library provide different choices of implementation to the user? For the most part, the platform will dictate the available solutions, so having the user decide would make their code non-portable. [my thought so far is no]

I disagree. On some platforms, there are multiple choices for the underlying event dispatching implementation. For example, on Linux you can use select, poll, or on newer kernels, epoll and kqueue.

Even on Windows, there is more than one implementation that can be used (e.g. WaitForMultipleObjects, select (which I assume just wraps WFMO), and IO Completion Ports).

Some of these are semi-portable (e.g. select, poll) but the others are very specific to the platform. As a user I want the ability to choose the one that is most suitable to the task at hand.

...

2. Would it be better perhaps to only provide behavior choices (sync, async, non-blocking) as part of the interface? [my thought is yes]

Not sure what you mean here. Connections may be either synchronous or asynchronous? This seems too limiting IMHO.

-- Caleb Epstein caleb dot epstein at gmail dot com

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