September 2009 C++ Standards Committee Mailing

Wednesday, 30 September 2009

The September 2009 mailing for the C++ Standards Committee was published today. This is the pre-meeting mailing for the October committee meeting and contains the first new working draft since the "Concepts" feature was voted out of C++0x in July.

There is also quite a large number of papers in this mailing, including 7 concurrency-related papers (of which my name is on 2), which I summarize below:

Concurrency-related papers

N2955: Comments on the C++ Memory Model Following a Partial Formalization Attempt

Mark has been working on a formal model for parts of the C++ memory model, and has identified a few cases where the wording could be improved to clarify things.

N2959: Managing the lifetime of thread_local variables with contexts (Revision 1)

This is a revision of my earlier paper, N2907 which expands my proposal for a thread_local_context class, along with full proposed wording. I think this provides a workable solution to the general problem of ensuring that destructors for thread_local variables are run at particular points in the execution of a program as discussed in N2880.

N2967: Issues on Futures

This paper that I co-authored with Detlef Vollmann provides a complete rewording for the "Futures" section of the standard (30.6). It folds the proposed changes from N2888 in with changes requested by the LWG at July's meeting (including the addition of a new future type — atomic_future which serializes all operations), and editorial comments on the earlier wording. It doesn't resolve everything — there is still some discussion over whether unique_future::get() should return a value or a reference, for example — but it provides a sound basis for further discussion.

N2969: Background for issue 887: Clocks and Condition Variables

Detlef argues the case that std::condition_variable::wait_for and std::condition_variable::wait_until may wake "too late" if the user adjusts the system clock during a wait, and suggests simplifying the overload set to match the minimum requirements of POSIX. LWG has already decided that this is Not A Defect (NAD), and I agree — there are no guarantees about how soon after the specified timeout the wait will return, and this is thus entirely a quality of implementation issue.

N2970: A simple async() (revision 1)

This is a revision to Herb Sutter's take on a std::async function. There is a lot of discussion around the various issues, but the proposed wording seems incomplete — for example, if the unique_future associated with a synchronous async call is moved into a shared_future which is then copied, which call to get() runs the task?

N2973: An Asynchronous Call for C++

This is a revision to Lawrence Crowl's take on a std::async function. Whilst better specified than N2970 (a "serial" task is invoked in unique_future::get() or when the unique_future is moved into a shared_future), I'm not entirely happy with the result.

N2974: An Analysis of Async and Futures

To aid the committee with deciding on the semantics of std::async, Lawrence has put together this paper which outlines various options for creating futures from an async function. He then goes on to outline the operations that we may wish to perform on those futures, and how they relate to the various options for async.

As you can see by the 3 papers on the issue, std::async is a hot topic. I hope that a single coherent design can be agreed on at Santa Cruz, and incorporated into the standard. Comment on this blog post if you've got an opinion on the matter, and I'll pass it on.

Other papers

As I said at the beginning of this post, there are quite a few papers in this mailing. Other than the new working draft, there were 3 papers that piqued my interest:

• N2954: Unified Function Syntax which proposes allowing lambda-style syntax for normal functions,
• N2953: Defining Move Special Member Functions which covers the implicit generation of move constructors and move assignment operators, and
• N2951: forward which covers the usage and constraints on std::forward

Other papers include changes to the allocator proposals, papers to cover specific core issues, a couple of papers on type traits and a couple on pairs and tuples. See the full paper list for further details.

Posted by Anthony Williams
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Tags: C++0x, C++, standards, concurrency
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