Re: Which libraries in Boost are mature enough to be used in real applications?
"kanze" <kanze@gabi-soft.fr> writes:
David Abrahams wrote:
[...]
If that's what you think Boost.Threads (or most any Boost
library) is, you really have no concept of how that library
was developed. It is by no means perfect, but even more than
most Boost libraries, Boost.Threads was entirely based on
extensive research of well-established existing practice.
In the case of the thread library, this isn't necessarily a good
thing. My impression of "existing practice" of multi-threaded
programs is that they tend to hang or crash at odd moments:-)
Yes, but that's because multithreaded programming is hard, and the
abstractions that make it easy and/or foolproof are at best a few
years off *today* (to say nothing of when Boost.Threads was designed).
The strongest abstractions and clearest reasoning then, as now, for
threaded programming come from pthreads, AFAICT.
(and that those which don't act like this today will as soon as
they start running on a multi-processor or a multi-core system).
(This isn't to say that having a nice, portable wrapper for the
underlying system calls isn't a good thing. Just that there are
limits to what you can do to ensure safe programming, when what
is or is not safe isn't really understood by your users.)
(so basically what you're saying has nothing to do with the argument
at hand about whether the design was "baked"...)
(...right?)
--
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com
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