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January 2007

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Review of the Accumulators library begins today, Jan 29
by Tom Brinkman 31 Jan '07

31 Jan '07

The formal review of the Boost.Accumulators library, submitted by Eric Neibler begins today and ends on Wednesday, February 7. The library is available from http://boost-consulting.com/vault/index.php?directory=Math%20-%20Numerics >From the documentation: Boost.Accumulators is both a library for incremental statistical computation as well as an extensible framework for incremental calculation in general. The library deals primarily with the concept of an accumulator, which is a primitive computational entity that accepts data one sample at a time and maintains some internal state. These accumulators may offload some of their computations on other accumulators, on which they depend. Accumulators are grouped within an accumulator set. Boost.Accumulators resolves the inter-dependencies between accumulators in a set and ensures that accumulators are processed in the proper order. Your comments may be brief or lengthy. If you identify problems along the way, please note if they are minor, serious, or showstoppers. Here are some questions you might want to answer in your review: • What is your evaluation of the design? • What is your evaluation of the implementation? • What is your evaluation of the documentation? • What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library? • Did you try to use the library? With what compiler? Did you have any problems? • How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A quick reading? In-depth study? • Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain? And finally, every review should answer this question: • Do you think the library should be accepted as a Boost library? Be sure to say this explicitly so that your other comments don't obscure your overall opinion. All interested parties are encouraged to submit a review. These can be sent to the developer list, the user list, or if you don't want to share your review with the general public it can be sent directly to me. Thanks to all for the work you will do on this review. John Phillips Review Manager

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Review Wizard Report
by Tom Brinkman 06 Jan '07

06 Jan '07

Review Wizard Report Thanks to "Ron Garcia" for keeping the Review Schedule page up to date: The current schedule is located at: http://www.boost.org/more/formal_review_schedule.html. If you have any changes, post them as a reply to this thread. We need experienced review managers for most of the libraries. If your interested, let us know. Preferably, you would have a background in the problem domain, but no association with the library and a regular contributer on the boost mailing list. You can read the "review manager" requirements at the following link: http://www.boost.org/more/formal_review_process.htm Most of the libraries are located at the Boost Sandbox Vault, located here: http://boost-consulting.com/vault/ Here is a summary of the libraries that are in the queue. ------------------------------------- Library: Accumulators Author: Eric Niebler Location: Boost Sandbox Vault Review Manger: John R. Phillips Date: January 29, 2007 - February 7, 2007 Summary: The Accumulators Framework is framework for performing incremental calculations. Usage of the framework follows the following pattern: Users build a computational object, called an accumulator_set<>, by selecting the computations in which they are interested, or authoring their own computational primitives which fit within the framework. Users push data into the accumulator_set<> object one sample at a time. The accumulator_set<> computes the requested quantities in the most efficient method possible, resolving dependencies between requested calculations, possibly cacheing intermediate results. The Accumulators Framework defines the utilities needed for defining primitive computational elements, called accumulators. It also provides the accumulator_set<> type, described above. ------------------------------------- Library: Exception Author: Emil Dotchevski Location: http://www.revergestudios.com/boost-exception/boost-exception.zip Review Manager: Needed Date: Needed Summary: The purpose of Boost Exception is to free designers of exception classes from having to consider what data needs to be stored in exception objects in order for the catch site to be able to make sense of what went wrong. When Boost Exception is used, arbitrary values can be stored in any exception. This can be done directly in the throw-expression, or at a later time as the exception object propagates up the call stack. The ability to add data to any exception object after it has been thrown is important, because often some of the information needed to handle an exception is unavailable at the time of the throw. ----------------------------------------- Library: Bimap Author: Matias Capeletto Location: Boost Sandbox Vault Review Manager: Needed Date: Needed Summary: With Boost.Bimap you can create associative containers where both types can be used as key. You can think a `bimap<X,Y>` as a merge of a `std::map<X,Y>` and a `std::map<Y,X>`. The learning curve of bimap is almost zero if you know how to use standard containers. A big effort was put in mapping the naming scheme of the STL in Boost.Bimap. The library is designed to match the STL common containers. ----------------------------------------- Library: Globally Unique Identifier Author: Andy Tompkins Location: Boost Sandbox Vault Review Manager: Needed Date: Needed Summary: A guid, or globally unique identifier, is an identifier standard used in many disciplines including computer networks, distributed computing, and databases. They can be used to tag objects with very short lifetimes, to reliably identify very persistent objects across a network. An attractive feature of guids is their relative small size, of 128-bits, compared to alternatives. Also the creation of guids does not require a centralized authority. ----------------------------------------- Library: Intrusive Containers Author: Ion Gaztañaga Location: Boost Sandbox Vault Review Manager: Needed Date: Needed Summary: Existing practice have shown the need for intrusive containers. Widely used C++ libraries, such as C++ Standard Library and Boost have long missed such facilities so that users had to refrain from using those due to mandatory element copying or fall back to techniques like two phase construction to insert logically non-copyable elements in containers and initialize them after that or insert pointers to dynamically allocated objects which is rather inelegant and inefficient since containers also dynamically allocate nodes. The most common use cases for intrusive containers are, when one would like to store non-copyable elements in a container when it's beneficial to avoid needless data copy in performance critical applications. The most prominent example of both the use cases, although written for the most part in C rather than C++, is Linux kernel built solely upon intrusive lists, hash tables and trees. ----------------------------------------- Library: Scope Exit Author: Alexander Nasonov Location: Boost Sandbox Vault Review Manager: Needed Date: Needed Summary: The scope-exit-arg-pp-seq is Boot.Preprocessor sequence of identifiers that can be used inside scope-exit-body. The direct-declarator is declarator-id followed by optional argument of type boost::scope_exit_group (inside brackets or after the equal sign). This construct executes scope-exit-body at the close of the current scope. ----------------------------------------- Library: Finite State Machines Author: Andrey Semashev Location: Boost Sandbox Vault Review Manager: Needed Date: Needed Summary: The Boost.FSM library is an implementation of FSM (stands for Finite State Machine) programming concept. There are many cases when a developer would like to distinguish the behavior of a given object depending on some conditions or its internal state. For example, when making software to control an underground charging tourniquiet a programmer would like to separate states in which the tourniquiet may persist: an idle state, when the device awaits for another passenger that would like to pass; a processing state, when the passenger have come and put his ticket into the device; and the passing state, when the tourniquiet lets the passenger pass through. In fact, each state describes different reaction of the machine at the same events (a passenger may only pass after paying for ticket). Obviously, the tourniquiet have to be able to change its internal state in order to function properly, this is called state switching or transitions between states (or just transitions for short). ----------------------------------- Library: Statistical Distributions Author: John Maddock Location: Boost Sandbox Vault (math-toolkit) Review Manager: Needed Date: Needed Summary: Provides many of the tools required to implement mathematical special functions: hopefully the presence of these will encourage other authors to contribute more special function implementations in the future. There are helpers for the evaluation of infinite series, continued fractions and rational approximations. There is a fairly comprehensive set of root finding and function minimisation algorithms: both with and without derivative support. A Remez algorithm implementation allows for the locating of minimax rational approximations. There are also (experimental) classes for the manipulation of polynomials, for testing a special function against tabulated test data, and for the rapid generation of test data and/or data for output to an external graphing application.

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