crazygrape said:
Hi All,
Was wondering if anyone has had experience with ACE and what they thought
about it. I've got a socks server app that has to support 20,000 to 80,000
concurrent connections (i'm going to break it up and distribute it over a
dozen boxes or so ... ) and am looking at ACE as the core networking
library.
If you have to support multiple platforms and deal with networking and
multithreading the ACE library is probably the way to go or at least a
reasonably safe bet. I do have mixed feelings about it. It is certainly not
perfect nor bug free, but it is quite useable. Whether it is fast and robust
enough for your application I really don't know, you will have to ask that
the people at comp.soft-sys.ace
The documentation leaves something to be desired, but that situation is
slowly improving. There is doxygen documentation which can serve as a
reference for the ACE library. However descriptions of functions, return
values and parameters are sometimes missing. So sometimes you have to dig in
the source code after all. The doxygen documentation doesn't provide the
necessary background information. There is however a tutorial and two books
about the ACE library which can help you get started.
In some areas the library is weak. Especially the container classes
(including the ACE string classes) are nowhere near the container classes of
the standard library; they are inconsistent, often incomplete and the
awkward iterators don't mix well (if at all) with standard library
algorithms.
Also the fact that ACE targets so many platforms has a downside. It means
the developers had to consider for the lowest common denominator of C++
features supported by all compilers. This didn't help to make the code
elegant. Also the excessive use of macro's can make debugging problems
inside the ACE library (sometimes you have to, unfortunately) a real pain.
On the other hand the ACE library has an active user & developer community
supported by many companies. So ACE won't go away any time soon and will
continue to improve in the foreseeable future.
Thanks in advance
SG
(e-mail address removed)
ps. please cc' my email address on replies.
Post here, read here.
