Poco vs. ACE

[lewislp]

Having spent a good amount of time using ACE for cross-platform interoperability and as a general class library, I was less than satisfied with the complexity of the code (mostly due to macros) and poor documentation. After poking around the web for alternatives, I eliminated Boost (not broad enough), Platinum (too immature and inconsistent), and JUCE (great for audio -- missing other components).

Poco is the closest thing to a real class library for C++ (in the style of the .NET or Java class libraries) with clean code, non-old-school naming conventions, and pretty good documentation.

I'm surprised more folks haven't stumbled across this library, or maybe they have and aren't very vocal in the forums.

Thanks guys.

[dsrmac]

I am coming from ACE, too. I had used ACE mostly for server development in a project where the server had to handle 10k concurrent connections. ACE did hold that very well, but the team was suffering from ACE's complexity and thus we stumbled over Poco.

We're currently porting our software from ACE to Poco. Why? Poco has this "Just Works" touch.

[alex]

We're currently porting our software from ACE to Poco. Why? Poco has this "Just Works" touch.

That's a good reason but hopefully you are aware that, as it currently stands (due to limitations of Reactor and lack of Proactor), POCO may not handle 10K concurrent connections as well as ACE. We do want and plan to have the the async IO feature and I've done a little bit of work there, but nothing is even in the development repository yet and there are no concrete release schedule plans.

[dsrmac]

We're aware of this, but it's no issue for now. We've just created a new branch in our Git repository where we make the changes. If we should see any areas where Poco lacks support and have time and budget left, we might provide patches. No promises though, as we're working for the government *sigh*