Speaker: Filipp Gelman

Audience level: [ Intermediate ]

This talk will discuss how socket concepts like select or poll can be used when composing all kinds of concurrent operations in C++.

Unix systems implement a rich set of primitives for working concurrently with file descriptors. Interfaces like select, poll, epoll, and kqueue allow the caller to wait until an event occurs on any of the specified file descriptors - that is, until at least one of them becomes "ready" for some operation. The Go programming language has a "select" statement with similar semantics. It may be used to wait for any of several "channels" to become ready.

This talk will demonstrate to attendees that such an approach is also viable for solving problems that involve concurrent operations. It will also how C++ concurrency mechanisms could support similar semantics. By the end, it will provide answers to questions like: "How can I .get() the first of several futures?" and "How can I co_await the first of several coroutines?"