Re: ORBit for robotics??

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Marten,

On Tue, 2002-10-22 at 13:28, Mårten Björkman wrote:
> I am a researcher working within a lab called Centre of Autonomous
> Systems

	Sounds like most interesting work.

> So, what should we use instead? ORBit? Is it stable enough? Thread-safe?
> For some processes, like input devices, threads can be quite handy. Do
> you have any other suggestions?

	Ok; so ORBit2 should give you far faster compile times - especially if
you use pure C. There are embryonic - but mostly working C++ bindings in
the 'orbitcpp' CVS module. ORBit2 also has some nice python bindings
coming along.

	ORBit2 is not thread safe - although making it so in a minimal sense
shouldn't be that many days work; we already have much infrastructure in
place for that. We use re-entering method dispatch to avoid blocking in
outgoing calls.

	If you have problems with exotic non-poll driven I/O then I'd recommend
using a helper thread to do that badness, and re-vector the input stream
via a socketpair to the main thread - we do that in GnomeVFS to good
effect for example.

	As for video transport; I've no idea how fast you expect that can be;
but I doubt we'll be markedly faster than ACE - if you have lots of
data.

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks@gnu.org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot