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[release] Boost 1.85.0
by Marshall Clow 15 Apr '24

15 Apr '24

Release 1.85.0 of the Boost C++ Libraries is now available. These open-source libraries work well with the C++ Standard Library, and are usable across a broad spectrum of applications. The Boost license encourages both commercial and non-commercial use. This release contains two new libraries: * Boost.Charconv: A high quality implementation of <charconv> in C++11, from Matt Borland. * Boost.Scope: A collection of scope guard utilities and a unique_resource wrapper, from Andrey Semashev. The release also contains numerous enhancements and bug fixes for existing libraries. For details, including download links, see <http://www.boost.org/users/news/version_1.85.0> You can also download directly from: <https://boostorg.jfrog.io/artifactory/main/release/1.85.0/> To install this release on your system, see <http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/release/more/getting_started/index.html> Thanks to everyone who participated in this release. -- The Boost Release Team Marshall Clow, Glen Fernandes

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[release] Boost 1.85.0 beta 1 is available
by Marshall Clow 13 Mar '24

13 Mar '24

Boost release 1.85.0 beta 1 is now available at: https://boostorg.jfrog.io/artifactory/main/beta/1.85.0.beta1/source/ The SHA256 checksums are: c13b76f420684a8d5b2eb0f297c281348ba0311d50354d952c5ce7c689e7879b boost_1_85_0_b1.zip e65d529023c7b08d0b92c53fff24ce9df9568cc0fe667c90caf8a9dbc5e63b0d boost_1_85_0_b1.7z 9c1ce4793342e8e57eb34c61f774a9dac0c6fc036084785e416613a18091bacc boost_1_85_0_b1.tar.gz cf7449faedeac9b76bade8ee59007cc4456a14de375dfcbd9e6e38aabe8a1334 boost_1_85_0_b1.tar.bz2 There was one problem reported during the beta release process; when you build the release using b2, it will emit a warning: [errno 2] failed to scan file '': No such file or directory This is harmless, and will be fixed for the final release. the release notes are available at: https://www.boost.org/users/history/version_1_85_0.html Please try the beta and report any problems you encounter. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the release. -- Boost Release Team

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Review of Parser library ends Wednesday, February 28th.
by Marshall Clow 25 Feb '24

25 Feb '24

So far we’ve received five reviews, and one of them was “docs only”. Keep those reviews coming! — Marshall

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Review of Parser library begins today
by Marshall Clow 19 Feb '24

19 Feb '24

The review of Zach Laine’s proposed Boost.Parser library begins today and will end on February 28th. From the introduction page of the documentation: Boost.Parser is a parser combinator library. That is, it consists of a set of low-level primitive parsers, and operations that can be used to combine those parsers into more complicated parsers. There are primitive parsers that parse epsilon (the empty string), chars, ints, floats, etc. There are operations which combine parsers to create new parsers. For instance, the Kleene star operation takes an existing parser p and creates a new parser that matches zero or more occurrences of whatever p matches. Both callable objects and operator overloads are used for the combining operations. For instance, operator*() is used for Kleene star, and you can also write repeat(n)[p] to create a parser for exactly n repetitions of p. Boost.Parser also tries to accommodate the multiple ways that people often want to get a parse result out of their parsing code. Some parsing may best be done by returning an object that represents the result of the parse. Other parsing may best be done by filling in a preexisting data structure. Yet other parsing may best be done by parsing small sections of a large document, and reporting the results of subparsers as they are finished, via callbacks. Boost.Parser accommodates all these ways of working, and even makes it possible to do callback-based or non-callback-based parsing without rewriting any code (except by changing the top-level call from parse() to callback_parse()). All of Boost.Parser's public interfaces are sentinel- and range-friendly, just like the interfaces in std::ranges. Boost.Parser is Unicode-aware through and through. When you parse ranges of char, Boost.Parser does not assume any particular encoding — not Unicode or any other encoding. Parsing of inputs other than plain chars assumes that the input is Unicode. In the Unicode-aware code paths, all parsing is done by matching code points. This means that you can feed UTF-8 strings into Boost.Parser, both as input and within your parser, and the right sort of matching occurs. For instance, if your parser is trying to match repetitions of the char '\xcc' (which is a lead byte from a UTF-8 sequence, and so is malformed UTF-8 if not followed by an appropriate UTF-8 code unit), it will not match the start of "\xcc\x80" (UTF-8 for the code point U+0300). Boost.Parser knows that the matching must be whole-code-point, and so it interprets the char '\xcc' as the code point U+00CC. Error reporting is important to get right, and it is important to make errors easy to understand, especially for end-users. Boost.Parser produces runtime parse error messages that are very similar to the diagnostics that you get when compiling with GCC and Clang (it even supports warnings that don't fail the parse). The exact token associated with a diagnostic can be reported to the user, with the containing line quoted, and with a marker pointing right at the token. Boost.Parser takes care of this for you; your parser does not need to include any special code to make this happen. Of course, you can also replace the error handler entirely, if it doesn't fit your needs. Debugging complex parsers can be a real nightmare. Boost.Parser makes it trivial to get a trace of your entire parse, with easy-to-read (and very verbose) indications of where each part of the trace is within the parse, the state of values produced by the parse, etc. Again, you don't need to write any code to make this happen — you just pass a parameter to parse(). Github: https://github.com/tzlaine/parser Docs https://tzlaine.github.io/parser — Marshall

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Review of Parser library scheduled
by Mateusz Loskot 17 Jan '24

17 Jan '24

Folk, Review of Zach Laine's Praser library has been scheduled [1] for February 19, 2024 - February 28, 2024 Big thanks to Marshall Clow for volunteering to be the review manager. [1] https://www.boost.org/community/review_schedule.html Best regards, -- Mateusz Loskot on behalf of Boost Review Wizard

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[boost] Boost.Charconv review from January 15th - 25th, 2024
by Christopher Kormanyos 15 Jan '24

15 Jan '24

Dear all, The review of Boost.Charconv by Matt Borland runs Monday, January 15th through January 25th, 2024. Code: https://github.com/cppalliance/charconvDocs: https://master.charconv.cpp.al/Review Schedule: https://www.boost.org/community/review_schedule.html Thank you for considering this review. Please optionally provide feedback on the followinggeneral topics: - 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? Christopher KormanyosBoost.Charconv Review Manager

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[release] Boost 1.84.0
by Marshall Clow 14 Dec '23

14 Dec '23

Release 1.84.0 of the Boost C++ Libraries is now available. These open-source libraries work well with the C++ Standard Library, and are usable across a broad spectrum of applications. The Boost license encourages both commercial and non-commercial use. This release contain two new libraries, numerous enhancements and bug fixes for existing libraries. For details, including download links, see <http://www.boost.org/users/news/version_1.84.0> You can also download directly from: <https://boostorg.jfrog.io/artifactory/main/release/1.84.0/source> To install this release on your system, see <http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/release/more/getting_started/index.html> Thanks to everyone who participated in this release. -- The Boost Release Team Marshall Clow, Glen Fernandes

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[boost] [scope] Scope review starts on November 26th
by Дмитрий Архипов 24 Nov '23

24 Nov '23

Dear Boost community. The peer review of the proposed Boost.Scope will start on 26th of November and continue until December 5th. Boost.Scope is a small library implementing utilities defined in <experimental/scope> from C++ Extensions for Library Fundamentals v3 with a few extensions. Namely, the library contains: * A number of scope guards for various use cases. * A unique resource wrapper that automatically frees the resource on destruction. * Utilities for wrapping POSIX-like file descriptors in the unique resource wrapper. You can find the source code of the library at https://github.com/Lastique/scope and read the documentation at https://lastique.github.io/scope/libs/scope/doc/html/index.html. The library is header-only and thus it is fairly easy to try it out. In addition, the library can be used with Conan and vcpkg (see its README for instructions on how to do that). Finally, there's a single header version suitable for Compiler Explorer (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Lastique/scope/single-header/include/boos…). As the library is not domain-specific, everyone is very welcome to contribute a review either by sending it to the Boost mailing list, or me personally. In your review please state whether you recommend to reject or accept the library into Boost, and whether you suggest any conditions for acceptance. Thanks in advance for your time and effort! Dmitry Arkhipov, Staff Engineer at The C++ Alliance.

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[release] Boost 1.84.0 beta 1 released
by Marshall Clow 16 Nov '23

16 Nov '23

Boost release 1.84.0 beta 1 is now available at: https://boostorg.jfrog.io/artifactory/main/beta/1.84.0.beta1/source/ The SHA256 checksums are: 224d595cc666c19b91214c5e9cced3988d08063146dfad9f616c481d52626f27 boost_1_84_0_b1.zip de9b35e232e4b1769f4d800ec01255a9c2546639be43e45b16ce6d109c088e99 boost_1_84_0_b1.tar.gz f8a9f21580961536a95fb7fcf9deebde45d7e0e94ddd81402f1e37ae2c590410 boost_1_84_0_b1.tar.bz2 3e4765c41974c763b7d4a67a432569bf75d3367d7a6b72c4ac9458e5004c59dc boost_1_84_0_b1.7z Release notes (still need updates): https://www.boost.org/users/history/version_1_84_0.html Please try the beta and report any problems you encounter. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the release. -- Boost Release Team

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[Async] Peer review report and conditions
by Niall Douglas 11 Oct '23

11 Oct '23

Dear Boost, Proposed Boost.Async by Klemens Morgenstern was reviewed between 8th and 18th August, and again between 22nd September and 2nd October. Reviews or substantially detailed comments came from: - /u/trailing_zero_count on Reddit - Ruben Perez - Marcelo Zimbres Silva - Andrzej Krzemienski - Mohammad Nejati - Janko Dedic - Robert Leahy I would like to thank those above for taking the time to write their detailed comments or reviews, and if I forgot to list anyone, please do forgive me. I did read all reviews and comments as they came in, so even if your name is not listed above, I did take into account your feedback. I would also like to thank all those far too many to list here who gave initial impressions, relaying spelling mistakes in the docs, or otherwise gave feedback of various forms. Boost could not continue without you! The tl;dr; outcome is that proposed Boost.Async is ACCEPTED but with CONDITIONS. Next follows are the **binding** conditions without which the library is not accepted: 1. The library needs to be renamed to something the Boost community doesn’t object to Quite a bit of discussion and feedback surrounded the proposed name “Boost.Async”. Multiple people felt that the name claims too much seeing as it is a C++ 20 coroutines only library, and is from first appearances entirely tied into Boost.ASIO (technically, any ASIO i/o executor can wrap any third party executor, but I can see where people get the strong ASIO association). I agree with Klemens that putting “ASIO” in the new name would be out of character with the other Boost libraries also heavily orientated around Boost.ASIO which do not have ASIO in their name. I find the suggestions that C++ 20 coroutines needs to be somehow in the name convincing. Exactly what form it should take I’ll leave up to the author and community to negotiate, but “Boost.Async” is definitely not a name with good buy-in in the Boost community. It cannot be named “Boost.Async” if it is to enter Boost. 2. The `select()` operation either needs to have its semantics changed, or be renamed Quite a few reviewers found the current semantics unpleasantly surprising, in that a random ready awaitable is chosen and all the others cancelled. This is far away from what `select()` typically means in the C and C++ worlds, and multiple reviewers commented negatively about this. The docs are unclear if it is guaranteed that the first ready awaitable is always chosen, or whether it is _some_ ready awaitable. The difference is important in many kinds of async programming. As this is a single threaded implementation, it should be possible to offer strict guarantees here. The semantics are acceptable if the operation is not called “select”, so I would suggest the easiest course here is to rename that operation to something more acceptable to the Boost community. 3. Channels need to terminate the process if relocated during use, or be made immovable, rather than it being UB to relocate them Some reviewers found the hard UB of moving a channel in use a poor design decision. Hard UB is good if it confers distinct benefits, however reviewers couldn’t see one here, and neither can I. As this library requires C++ 20 in any case, the obvious thing to do is make them immovable, but if that is felt too cumbersome, then they ought to noisily terminate the process or something not footgunny if relocated during use. Other non-binding feedback, which is not a hard condition of acceptance: - Multiple people found the naming of `promise` confusing. A promise is something in C++ land associated with a future, and I suppose in a few years it will also be associated with C++ coroutine awaitables. But here we have an awaitable named `promise`? Yes I know it makes sense in other programming languages, but here in C++ land it just seems weird and confusing for no obvious gain. I personally would suggest `eager_task` and `lazy_task` but I have no especially strong opinions on naming here other than that `promise` is a poor choice for any awaitable type. In fact, I think just don’t put the word “promise” into any awaitable type period. - I am sympathetic to multiple people raising the lack of preconditions and postconditions on operations described in the documentation. I also accept that in an async world, it’s hard to be precise. However, I think it would be a large benefit to the documentation to describe for each operation a list of the ways in which it can fail, and I think this should be added. - Andrzej took issue with the design of the generators, and I can see why. However, out in real world code land, C++ coroutine generators have surprisingly large amount of design variation. I’ve seen ones which you loop on testing them for boolean true, I’ve seen others which loop on their iterators, I’ve even seen ones which don’t implement either boolean true nor iterators and require you to call a `value()` member function which returns an Optional. Why? No idea, people seem to innovate uselessly here for some reason. I think it wise to adhere to `std::generator` from the standard, and do exactly what it does. From my reading of Async’s `generator`, whilst it has extensions e.g. the invocable call operator, the only thing missing is the iterator interface to make it implement `std::generator` and I don’t see any obvious reason why an iterator interface can’t be added here? - I agree with Andrzej about ever throwing `std::logic_error`, it should not be done in newly written code. It is recognised as a mistake by most on the standards committee nowadays. - The Mersenne Twister is a poor PRNG by modern standards. You should use JSF or anything else both much faster and higher quality. - More than one reviewer wants the docs to do a much better job on documenting pseudo-awaitables and awaitables and `await_transform`. - Quite a few times the docs talks about “async” when it really means “C++ coroutines”. - I think the docs does a poor job of disambiguating when what it is describing is part of the C++ standard, or it is part of Boost.Async. The reason this is important is that users need to know when/if they are locking themselves into Boost.Async proprietary extensions vs standard C++ coroutines. Finally, as a personal note on the review, it was notable how much negativity there currently is against C++ coroutines in general from the C++ community. A small number of us have been writing C++ coroutine code for many years now, we have been through the process of getting footgunned over lifetime issues, got frustrated that these coroutines are not the coroutines we were looking for, and eventually came round to understanding what C++ coroutines are good at solving, and more importantly what they are NOT good at solving. Once your head is wrapped around that, then comes the problem of having to reinvent a C++ coroutine support library because all the current open source ones have severe issues, especially around very tight coupling being imposed on your codebase. I don’t personally agree with every design decision in proposed Boost.Async, but I do think this will be a major step forward in making C++ coroutines accessible to many more developers than now, especially because this is to my knowledge the first standards-based loosely coupled C++ coroutines library which is open source. Undoubtedly after it ships with Boost, deficiencies will be found both in this library and in the currently quite poor quality implementation of C++ coroutines in the three major compilers. I very much hope that the increased number of developers using C++ coroutines as a result of this new Boost library will result in large and substantial improvements in implementation and library support of C++ coroutines. My thanks to Klemens for putting the work into what is a controversial and opinionated library design quite unlike any other currently available. It’s not easy to tread new ground without much precedent. My thanks to the Boost and Reddit communities for their ample and detailed review feedback, which made me managing this review possible.

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