To ACE or it or not

August 15, 2006 1:16 PM

Experiences using ACE in large projects? Alternatives?

I've been looking at various possibilities for a platform-independent framework to learn/build a couple things on top of. It looks like my options are Apache APR, ACE, WxWindows/Qt, Mozilla NSPR, or GTK+'s glib. I'm not looking for a windowing environment - I already have a seperate library I like for that - so WxWindows & Qt are knocked down a bit on the list, and NSPR doesn't seem to be kept up to date terribly well.

So that leaves me with ACE, glib, & APR. I really like the idea of ACE, but I want to get some general impressions first. Has anyone out there used it? What were your experiences with it? What worked well in it, & what was better by hand? Is it massive overkill for a project that isn't distributed? At some point I may do some basic network/grid type things, but is "maybe somewhere down the line" worth committing to as heavy a framework as it is?

posted by devilsbrigade to computers & internet (1 comment total)

I tried it for a network daemon project several years ago, but it didn't have the exact semantics I wanted, so I ended up writing/donating some code. I don't know whether my changes were incorporated, or whether they're still there. Anyway, it seemed like a nice toolkit for certain things (and it was easy enough to modify to be the way I wanted) but I prefer to roll my own libraries. Almost without exception, when I use a library more complex than libc, there are hidden bits of infrastructure that I either need to tweak, or that get stepped on inadvertently (if not by me, then by some other library I'm also trying to use).

"Easy to use" is easy to say.
posted by spacewrench at 3:35 PM on August 15, 2006