11-13-12 - Another Oodle Rewrite Note

Of course this is not going to happen. But in the imaginary world in which I rewrite from scratch :

I've got a million (actually several hundred) APIs that start an Async op. All of those APIs take a bunch of standard arguments that they all share, so they all look like :

OodleHandle Oodle_Read_Async(

                // function-specific args :
                OodleIOQFile file,void * memory,SINTa size,S64 position,

                // standard args on every _Async function :
                OodleHandleAutoDelete autoDelete,OodlePriority priority,const OodleHandle * dependencies,S32 numDependencies);

The idea was that you pass in everything needed to start the op, and when it's returned you get a fully valid Handle which is enqueued to run.

What I should have done was make all the little _Async functions create an incomplete handle, and then have a standard function to start it. Something like :

// prep an async handle but don't start it :
OodleHandleStaging Oodle_Make_Read(
                OodleIOQFile file,void * memory,SINTa size,S64 position
                );

// standard function to run any op :
OodleHandle Oodle_Start( OodleHandleStaging handle,
                OodleHandleAutoDelete autoDelete,OodlePriority priority,const OodleHandle * dependencies,S32 numDependencies);

it would remove a ton of boiler-plate out of all my functions, and make it a lot easier to add more standard args, or have different ways of firing off handles. It would also allow things like creating a bunch of "Staging" handles that aren't enqueued yet, and then firing them off all at once, or even just holding them un-fired for a while, etc.

It's sort of ugly to make clients call two functions to run an async op, but you can always get client code that looks just like the old way by doing :

OodleHandle Oodle_Start( Oodle_Make_Read( OodleIOQFile file,void * memory,SINTa size,S64 position ) ,
                OodleHandleAutoDelete autoDelete,OodlePriority priority,const OodleHandle * dependencies,S32 numDependencies);

and I could easily make macros that make that look like one function call.

Having that interval of a partially-constructed op would also let me add more attributes that you could set on the Staging handle before firing it off.

(for example : when I was testing compresses on enwik, some of the tasks could allocate something like 256MB each; it occurred to me that a robust task system should understand limitting the number of tasks that run at the same time if their usage of some resource exceeds the max. eg. for memory usage, if you know you have 2 GB free, don't run more than 8 of those 256 MB tasks at once, but you could run other non-memory-hungry tasks during that time. (I guess the general way to do that would be to make task groups and assign tasks to groups and then limit the number from a certain group that can run simultaneously))