Identifying quickly what is the current process

All again,

there are various situations where knowing what is the current process
(if any) is important.
For instance, one could want to compute statistics on a per SystemC
process basis.
The current norm standardized very useful APIs to get information about
what is the current process, with sc_get_current_process_handle() and
the sc_process_handle
class.

However, there is no convenient and efficient way to understand what is
the current process
compared to previous invocations of sc_get_current_process_handle(). As
an example, let us
imagine I want to gather statistics about all processes in the
simulation. I would build an array
whose index would be a "process identifier" and that would contain my
"per-process" stat.

  - The const char * returned by name() in sc_process_handle could be a
candidate to this "process identifier",
but this is rather inefficient (many string compare to understand in
which array index I already
stored my stat.,

  - The adress of the sc_process_handle object cannot be taken as
"process identifier" as one could
have two different sc_process_handle representing the same process
information,

  - There is also the operator== that allows to compare whether two
process handle actually represent
the same process's information. This would oblige to use the
sc_process_handle object itself (and not
a pointer to it) as the process indentified, which is not very
convenient, especially if you want to use a STL container
for the array (I guess that the copy constructor is private, which means
no std::vector, etc., etc.).

So we want to propose to add a method to the sc_process_handle class,
that could be as below:

uint64_t id() const;

and that could return a unique integer identifier associated with the
process. Hence, it would be
possible to retrieve and compare very quickly in what is the current
process.

Jerome Cornet
STMicroelectronics

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