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courier

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A simple, lightweight C++17 event bus/dispatcher. It allows communication between components through subscription and events. A function is attached to a particular event, user posts an event and then all subscribed functions are called with this specific event.

Event dispatchers are particularly popular in game development. Usually, physics engines send events about collisions between entities so that the users of the engine can subscribe, to handle them however they want without coupling game code with the physics engine code. Events may contain mutable data. courier permits any type to be sent as long as it is registered in the dispatcher.

Table of contents

Benchmark

Description

courier and other programs were compiled with -O3 to squeeze out the best out of the optimizer. The benchmarking tests were perfomed on an 8-Core Intel Core i9 16 GB.

EnTT vs courier

Results were rounded to the 5th decimal place. Times are represented in milliseconds.

Three events (max sizeof = 4 bytes) sent thousands of times

Iterations Mean time courier Mean time EnTT Std Dev courier Std Dev EnTT
20k 0.02ms 0.23ms 0.00ms 0.06ms
50k 0.05ms 0.52ms 0.00ms 0.06ms
100k 0.09ms 1.05ms 0.02ms 0.13ms
200k 0.18ms 2.11ms 0.02ms 0.20ms
500k 0.46ms 5.28ms 0.09ms 0.31ms

This shows about 10x improvement over EnTT for small events.

Three events (max sizeof = 80 bytes) sent thousands of times

Iterations Mean time courier Mean time EnTT Std Dev courier Std Dev EnTT
20k 0.13ms 0.34ms 0.02ms 0.04ms
50k 0.32ms 0.81ms 0.02ms 0.08ms
100k 0.69ms 1.72ms 0.14ms 0.09ms
200k 1.38ms 3.42ms 0.19ms 0.30ms
500k 3.64ms 9.01ms 0.54ms 0.58ms

This shows about 2.5x improvement over EnTT for large events.

Tested compilers

  • Linux CentOS x86-64, clang version 5.0.1
  • Linux CentOS x86-64, GCC version 7.3.1
  • MacOS, Apple clang version 11.0.3
  • MacOS, LLVM clang version 9.0.1
  • MacOS, GCC version 9.2.0

Example

/* Create some event classes */
struct HelloEvent {
    // ...
};

/* Another event class */
struct GoodbyeEvent {
    std::string name;
};

/* Dispatcher will not known this event for the sake of an example */
struct IgnoredEvent {};

/* This function will be attached to HelloEvent, later */
void on_hello(HelloEvent& event) {
    // ...
}

/* Define a dispatcher with all subscribable events */
courier::dispatcher<HelloEvent, GoodbyeEvent> dispatcher;  // handle HelloEvent and GoodbyeEvent
/* Attach functions to events */
dispatcher.add<HelloEvent>(&on_hello);
dispatcher.add<HelloEvent>([](auto&&...) { std::cout << "Hello!\n"; });
dispatcher.add<GoodbyeEvent>([](auto&& event) { std::cout << "Bye " << event.name << '\n'; });
/* Send events */
dispatcher.post<HelloEvent>();  // calls on_hello function and then prints "Hello!"
dispatcher.post<GoodbyeEvent>("Joe");  // prints "Bye Joe"
dispatcher.post<IgnoredEvent>();  // ignored because dispatcher does not know IgnoredEvent
                                  // also, runtime warning is displayed
dispatcher.add<IgnoredEvent>();  // error: dispatcher cannot subscribe to an unspecified event

Removing attached functions

auto some_event_handler = dispatcher.add<SomeEvent>(&on_some_event);
dispatcher.remove(some_event_handler);

Attaching member functions

Widget obj;
dispatcher.add<SomeEvent, &Widget::foo>(obj);

Compiling tests and examples

Requirements

  • CMake (tested on 3.14)
  • C++ compiler with support for C++17

Steps

# Generate a build/ directory
cmake -B build . -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
# Run generated Makefiles to compile everything
make -C build -j12

License

This project is under MIT License.

Copyright (c) 2020 Pawel Paruzel

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.