Seastar VS Boost

I used glommio as the async executor (instead of something like tokio), and it is wonderful. For people wondering whether it's "good enough" or to use C++ and seastar (as I have thought about a lot before starting this project), take the leap of faith, it's fast - both in terms of run time and to code.

b) It's proven now e.g Seastar, Glommio that the fastest way to run a multi-threaded application is to have one instance with one thread pinned per CPU core. Then to have fibers/lightweight threads on top handling all of the asynchronous code. Your approach of lots of instances is the slowest so there will be a ton of unnecessary thread context-switching.

The most common example is DPDK [1]. It's a framework for building bespoke networking stacks that are usable from userspace, without involving the kernel.

You'll find DPDK mentioned a lot in the networking/HPC/data center literature. An example of a backend framework that uses DPDK is the seastar framework [2]. Also, I recently stumbled upon a paper for efficient RPC networks in data centers [3].

If you want to learn more, the p99 conference by ScyllaDB has tons of speakers talking about some interesting challenges.

[1] https://www.dpdk.org/.

[2] https://github.com/scylladb/seastar

[3] https://github.com/erpc-io/eRPC

I assume Tokio itself, see e.g monoio or glommio, but also Seastar for C++.

https://core.dpdk.org/supported/ lists supported nics. You're best just reading material from the dpdk website for figuring out roughly what it is. It is used for a lot of different goals. For most web C++ stuff it's mainly used because you can avoid round trips of data passing through the kernel and can reference network data without tons of copying. For an example check out the SeaStar framework, https://seastar.io/, which is under the hood of ScyllaDB.

As this is a Kafka sub, this may be a good opportunity to mention that Redpanda is based on the same framework (seastar) as Scylla. The idea of sharding work to CPU cores turns out to apply very well to the Kafka data model, too!

Seastar which is a thread per core runtime written by the Scylla devs thats used in both Redpanda and Scylla as the underlying runtime. https://github.com/scylladb/seastar

ScyllaDB is, ironically, maybe one of the worst examples the author could have come up with for "abstraction" in the article.

If folks aren't familiar with their work/internal tech, go check out some of their repos like Seastar. They have some of the most talented systems programmers on the planet writing thin veneers over kernel and hardware API's to squeeze every ounce out of performance.

https://github.com/scylladb/seastar

I know it's beside the point, but I just had to share because I thought that was funny

I’ve seen frameworks for c++ (https://seastar.io/) and rust (https://github.com/actix/actix) which support what you’re describing out of the box.

If you're interested in scaling and asynchronous programming in c++ I highly recommend you investigate the SeaStar application framework. You wouldn't build a web service with SeaStar, rather you would build the infrastructure that you would use to build the web service on top of. https://github.com/scylladb/seastar

git clone https://github.com/boostorg/boost.git -b ${{ inputs.branch }} "${{ inputs.boost-dir }}" --depth 1 git submodule update --depth 1 -q --init tools/boostdep python tools/boostdep/depinst/depinst.py --include library_i_want"

Any thoughts on why it has exactly the same name as a popular source available project that's been around since the 1990s?

earliest archive: https://web.archive.org/web/19991011120524/http://www.boost....

latest commit (today): https://github.com/boostorg/boost/commit/7727baea944c6365301...

naming in 2023: "The Boost project provides free peer-reviewed portable C++ source libraries"

naming in 1999: "The Boost web site provides a repository for free C++ libraries"

Hmm...

include(FetchContent) FetchContent_Declare(boost URL https://github.com/boostorg/boost/releases/download/boost-1.81.0/boost-1.81.0.tar.xz ) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(boost) ...

set(BOOST_INCLUDE_LIBRARIES system thread) # enabled libraries set(BOOST_ENABLE_CMAKE ON) # CMake support FetchContent_Declare(boost GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/boostorg/boost.git ...

In fact, boost has cmake files now — pretty recent addition and I haven’t got around to testing, but no reason to think it doesn’t work. https://github.com/boostorg/boost. Also, boost is getting more modular with every release — more and more libraries can be pulled independently with mostly only depending on boost.core. Asio has been like this forever, but Boost.math is a recent example to the bandwagon. You can find an independent release package for math on GitHub now.

Do you build boost from sources? If so, maybe get the tar balls from their Github repository?