[gmpi] Re: Reqs 5, 6, 11 for debate

  • From: RonKuper@xxxxxxxxxxxx
  • To: gmpi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 22:04:33 -0500

>>>
Req 5 - Portable Runtime

The GMPI design group should research options for a cross-platform
portability library for GMPI plugins.  And existing library may be adopted,
or a new library may be drafted.  This should be a separate specification
from the GMPI API.  Plugins that wish to be most portable should use this
API instead of native APIs whenever possible.  This API is not the host
services API, which should handle certain host-specific services tasks.
<<<

To me this is drifiting away from the whole reason for wanting a runtime
system.  At least it's drifiting away from *my* reasoning.

We need a way for plugins to allocate memory, access the disk, and manage
threads, in a way that allows the host to manage and/or intervene.  The host
might the OS, or the host might be the host application.

In other words, when a GMPI plugin needs to allocate memory, it asks the
host for it.  The host exposes a memory allocator for the plugin.  The
plugin doesn't have a memory allocator compiled in, because that means
different hosts can't customize allocations to their requirements.

To me, the requirement is: the GMPI host interface must expose core services
to the plugin: memory management, disk IO, threading.  It is the
responsibility of every GMPI host to expose these services.  A deliverable
in the final GMPI developers kit will be reference implementations of these
services for hosts to expose to plugins.

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