Re: [boost] Is Boost interested in a Redis client library?

Em ter., 12 de abr. de 2022 às 05:11, Marcelo Zimbres Silva < mzimbres@gmail.com> escreveu:

On Tue, 12 Apr 2022 at 06:28, Vinícius dos Santos Oliveira wrote:

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This class detracts a lot from Boost.Asio's style. I'll borrow an explanation that was already given before:

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[...] makes the user a passive party in the design, who only has to react to incoming requests. I suggest that you consider a design that is closer to the Boost.Asio design. Let the user become the active party, who asks explicitly for the next request.

-- https://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2014/03/212072.php

IMO, he is confusing *Boost.Asio design* with *High vs low level design*. Let us have a look at this example from Asio itself

https://github.com/boostorg/asio/blob/a7db875e4e23d711194bcbcb88510ee298ea29...

That's not a library. That's an application. The mindset for libraries and applications differ. An application chooses, designs and applies policies. A library adopts the application's policies. A NodeJS application, for instance, will have a http.createServer() and a callback that gets called at each new request. How, then, do you answer questions such as "how do I defer the acceptance of new connections during high-load scenarios?". Boost.Asio OTOH never suffered from such problems. And then we have DeNo (NodeJS's successor) that gave up on the callback model: https://deno.com/blog/v1#promises-all-the-way-down It has nothing to do with high-level vs low-level. It's more like "policies are built-in and you can't change them". The public API of the chat_session is

class chat_session { public: void start(); void deliver(const std::string& msg); };

One could also erroneously think that the deliver() function above is "not following the Asio style" because it is not an async function and has no completion token. But in fact, it has to be this way for a couple of reasons

That's an application, not a library. It has hidden assumptions (policies) on how the application should behave. And it's not even real-world, it's just an example. - At the time you call deliver(msg) there may be an ongoing write,

in which case the message has to be queued and sent only after the ongoing write completes.

You can do the same with async_*() functions. There are multiple approaches. As an example: https://sourceforge.net/p/axiomq/code/ci/master/tree/include/axiomq/basic_qu... - Users should be able to call deliver from inside other coroutines.

That wouldn't work well if it were an async_ function. Think for example on two chat-sessions, sending messages to one another

coroutine() // Session1 { for (;;) { std::string msg; co_await net::async_read(socket1, net::dynamic_buffer(msg), ...);

// Wrong. co_await session2->async_deliver(msg); } }

Now if session2 becomes unresponsive, so does session1, which is undesirable. The read operation should never be interrupted by others IO operations.

Actually, it *is* desirable to block. I'll again borrow somebody else's explanation: Basically, RT signals or any kind of event queue has a major fundamental

queuing theory problem: if you have events happening really quickly, the events pile up, and queuing theory tells you that as you start having queueing problems, your latency increases, which in turn tends to mean that later events are even more likely to queue up, and you end up in a nasty meltdown schenario where your queues get longer and longer.

This is why RT signals suck so badly as a generic interface - clearly we cannot keep sending RT signals forever, because we'd run out of memory just keeping the signal queue information around.

-- http://web.archive.org/web/20190811221927/http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux... However, if you wish to use this fragile policy on your application, an async_*() function following Boost.Asio style won't stop you. You don't need to pass the same completion token to every async operation. At one call (e.g. the read() call) you might use the Gor-routine token and at another point you might use the detached token: https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_78_0/doc/html/boost_asio/reference/detached... std::string msg; co_await net::async_read(socket1, net::dynamic_buffer(msg), use_awaitable); session2->async_deliver(msg, net::detached); You only need to check whether async_deliver() clones the buffer (if it doesn't then you can clone it yourself before the call). Right now you're forcing all your users to go through the same policy. That's the mindset of an application, not a library. The explanation above should also make it clear why some way or

another a high level api that loops on async_read and async_write will end up having a callback. Users must somehow get their code called after each operation completes.

It's clear, but the premises are wrong.

Now, why does it matter? Take a look at this post:

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https://vorpus.org/blog/some-thoughts-on-asynchronous-api-design-in-a-post-a...

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I believe this has also been addressed above.

Not at all. I just had to mention queueing theory problems which was one of the problems the aforementioned blog post touches on. There are more. -- Vinícius dos Santos Oliveira https://vinipsmaker.github.io/