I'm trying to use something that could best be described as a binary output queue. In short, one thread will fill a queue with binary data and another will pop this data from the queue, sending it to a client socket.
What's the best way to do this with STL? I'm looking for something like std::queue but for many items at a time.
Thanks
What does "binary data" mean? Just memory buffers? Do you want to be able push/pop one buffer at a time? Then you should wrap a buffer into a class, or use std::vector<char>, and push/pop them onto std::deque.
I've needed this sort of thing for a network communications system in a multi-threaded environment.
In my case I just wrapped std::queue with an object that handled locking (std::queue is not thread-safe, generally speaking). The objects in the queue were just very lightweight wrappers over char*-style arrays.
Those wrappers also provided the following member functions which I find extremely useful.
insertByte(unsigned int location, char value)
insertWord(unsigned int location, int value)
insertLong(unsigned int location, long value)
getByte/Word/Long(unsigned int location)
These were particularly useful in this context, since the word and long values had to be byteswapped, and I could isolate that issue to the class that actually handled it at the end.
There were some slightly strange things we were doing with "larger than 4 byte" chunks of the binary data, which I thought at the time would prevent us from using std::vector, although these days I would just use it and play around with &vector[x].