Re: GCD Support in CoreBase / CFRunLoop

[Luboš Doležel]

On 02/06/2015 07:10 PM, Stefan Bidigaray wrote:
> Some of you might have glanced at the discussion concerning the support
> of GCD in CoreBase.  I'd like to get some input on what to do going
> forward, so please chime in if you can.
> 
> Essentially, the problem is that in order to integrate GCD with
> CFRunLoop, we need to use non-public APIs.  However, these non-public
> APIs are not supported by the official GCD implementation, only by a
> Linux only extension to GCD (http://nickhutchinson.me/libdispatch/). 
> The obvious problem here is that this solution only works on Linux, but
> another problem is that it is not supported (read, not packaged) by the
> most popular Linux distributions, including Debian and Ubuntu.
> 
> My gut feeling here is that we should not support this unofficial
> version of libdispatch and, instead, drop support for the GCD
> integration until a more cross-platform solution can be implemented,
> which may be never.  I'd like to get some input here, as another
> solution may simply be to disable GCD support by default, unless the
> required functions are found.  I'm leaning somewhat against the latter
> for the simple reason that I would like CoreBase to truly be
> cross-platform, not just support a hodge-podge of features that may or
> may not be available for a particular platform.  Or in this case, a
> feature that is only available on 1 of the 3 officially supported
> platforms (Linux, BSD and Windows).
> 
> Again, I would really appreciate some input and your thoughts.  Thanks

My suggestion would be to keep GCD enabled by default, but if a
supported GCD library is not found, then silently disable GCD support.
Only fail configuration if GCD support was explicitly required. I have
no idea how to achieve that with autotools.

My view is that without hooks for integrating into another event loop,
GCD is not very useful and will not see much real use.

If you decide to remove GCD support, then I'll unfortunately be
compelled to fork away.
-- 
Luboš Doležel