From: Jeff Garland (jeff_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-03-23 09:37:23
David Abrahams wrote:
>> Of course, like anything else, asio is not perfect -- a number of key
>> issues were uncovered during the review. In terms of required changes
>> I'm only going to cite a few:
>>
>> - Fixes to dynamic memory allocation issues
>> - Interface changes to support ipv4 and ipv6 seamlessly at runtime
>> - Improvements to support strongly typed socket interfaces
>
> If you're only citing a few of the required changes, where is the
> complete list? Keeping it out of public view doesn't make any sense
> to me.
What I was trying to say was that I was only requiring a 3 changes -- so
that's the entire list. My feeling was these were the only 'must-have'
changes even though there was certainly discussion of other changes and
extensions.
>> Chris has communicated a couple possible solutions to the memory
>> allocation issue and I'll ask that the interface and other changes for
>> this issue continue to be discussed on the Boost list so consensus can
>> be achieved on the best resolution.
>>
>> Other key improvements that should be explored as future enhancements
>> include:
>>
>> - Possible removal of some of the c-style interfaces
>> - Exploration of higher level iostream integrations
>> - Performance improvements
>> - Improved documentation (wouldn't be Boost w/o this one)
>>
>> Chris has a much longer list of changes garnered from the review and is
>> well on his way to addressing many of them.
>>
>> Note that there were several threads and discussions about performance,
>> which is particularly critical for the domain covered by asio. One of
>> the performance issues is the dynamic memory allocation issue cited
>> above. In general, the reviewers have extremely high expectations here.
>> However, after reviewing the discussion and library it's my belief that
>> many developers will find asio performance sufficient to build
>> significant projects with only the memory allocation changes. I expect
>> Chris will be able to address some of the other performance issues cited
>> by reviewers in asio over time.
>
> Are these issues addressable as an implementation detail, or will it
> cause an interface change?
I believe they are only implementation details (seems that Chris agrees
with this) -- the c-style interfaces issue being the exception. But it
is a large library so it's possible we've missed something in the public
interface that will need to change. As for the c-style interfaces,
the review discussion wasn't sufficient to convince me that it was a
possible change and the benefits weren't clear so I'm leaving it to the
discretion of the library author.
Jeff