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[Review] [ITL] ITL formal review results
by Hartmut Kaiser 18 Apr '10

18 Apr '10

Hi all, The formal review of the Interval Template Library (ITL) written by Joachim Faulhaber started February 18th and ended March 7th, 2010. We saw a lively discussion resulting in 14 votes: 10 people voted unconditionally YES, 3 voted conditionally YES, and 1 reviewer voted NO. The overwhelming majority of the votes was YES which reflects the overall discussion and the general consensus of this library being worth to be included into Boost. Based on this result and the discussions we saw the Interval Template Library is now formally accepted into Boost. Detailed results ---------------- Pros: Almost all reviewers highlighted the general usefulness of the library. The more experience the reviewers had with the library in real world applications the more they emphasized its usefulness. Here are some quotes: - "ITL solved this problem for me, in a way that honestly freed me from having to think about a lot of the unsavory low-level details." - " Until now, we only used the library for intervals of date-times (coded as integers), but I'm sure, that its usefulness goes far beyond." - " Very useful. I mentioned two projects where the library would have helped me if it had been into Boost earlier, and I'm considering rewriting them such that the problems make use of the library, and simplify them in that way." The comments on the quality of the documentation are unanimous: "impressive and quite complete", "I couldn't ask for more". It seemed to be generally helpful to understand the concepts of the library and to get started. Some people asked to add more simple quick-start examples to the documentation and the distribution. Overall, the library is mature and easy to use. All reviewers actually utilizing the ITL library for real world use cases reported they were able to start quickly and without problems. All reviewers using ITL in real world applications stated that no performance problems were encountered. This is important to note as the NO vote was based on the current lack of a interval tree implementation, which was considered to result in suboptimal performance for certain use cases. Cons: Some aspects of the design have been criticized: "OO-type design decisions", "fat 'one size fits all'-interval class template", and "incomplete extraction of global functions" are the major points of critique. These points have real merit. In order to make the design and interface more flexible and more durable these have to be rectified before the final inclusion of the library into Boost's code base. Joachim already agreed to a list of things to change addressing those problems. For certain use cases, specifically for interval map of collections, the current implementation has suboptimal complexity characteristics that leads to O(n^2) space usage in the worst case. OTOH, for the majority of applications of the library the worst case scenario seems to be (reportedly) irrelevant. This issue has been discussed at length and Joachim plans to add an implementation with a better worst case performance of the affected class templates as later optimizations. This is not considered to be a precondition to full inclusion into Boost's code base as it is not anticipated to cause any interface changes. Last but not least people suggested to change the name of the library as having the word template in the name does not carry any useful information. Joachim already agreed to this. Regards Hartmut Review Manager --------------- Meet me at BoostCon www.boostcon.com

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[boost] [log] Boost.Log formal review result
by Vladimir Prus 24 Mar '10

24 Mar '10

First of all, I would like to thank Andrey for this submission and the active discussion during the review. I also would like to thank everybody who participated in the review. The comments on the library were generally positive. Several reviewers have tried it in practical projects already, and found it superior to other libraries. It clearly will benefit the users of Boost right away. Therefore, the library is accepted. Congratulations, Andrey! On the other hand, some concerns about the ease of use and performance and implementation details were raised. Of those, some can be easily addressed as part of normal maintenance, while some seem to require significant rework and may change the library quite consirably. Therefore, the library is accepted subject to several conditions -- listed below under "Critical issues". Because the changes can be large, I think a mini-require is required when those issues are addressed. To avoid delays, it's probably not necessary to formally schedule and conduct a mini- review -- just posting a email asking for discussion will be sufficient. Statistics ========== There were roughly 300 emails during formal review (I have a mbox archive if anybody needs it). The following persons submitted a review with a vote. Some of votes are "provisional", this is not reflected below, but affects the list of critical issues below. - Boris Schaeling (yes) - Roland Bock (yes) - Ralf Globisch (yes) - Sean Chittenden (yes) - Darryl Green (no) - Tom Brinkman (no) - Barend (yes) - Sam Gundry (yes) - Vicente Botet (yes) - Robert Stewart (yes) - Alexander Arhipenko (yes) - "M-Square" (yes) Critical issues =============== These issues must be addressed, and be passed through informal mini- review, before the library can be added to SVN. - It appears that the 'trivial' logging is not sufficiently good to just take and use. The library should provide an out-of-the-box mechanism that: - supports channel/severity attributes, without creating new logger for each severity. It also should be possible to filter out specific channel by essentially poking at some "map", and without manually composing a new filter that checks for a set of allowed channels sequentally. I believe that at least Christian, Roland, Robert and myself requested this. - has no observable effect on compile time. One second (or more) that trivial.hpp imposes is not acceptable. - outputs to console by default, but permits changing that - outputs only component/severity/message by default, but probably permits changing that. - By default, the library should try hard to continue working no matter what errors happen during processign a log record -- including things like invalid attribute names or types, or other exceptions. - The library should not reinvent wheels. In particular, custom implementations of TSS and RW mutex seems like a very bad idea. Use of a custom lambda implementation was pointed by many as not great -- we already have a couple, so let's not add more to the mix. - Library interface is too geared towards lambda. In particular, implementing formatters/filters as free-standing functions appears to require considerably more code. In particular, it should be possible to access an attribute using a single function call. Also, logging::extract taking a lambda for callback complicates matters, it's desirable to have a more direct variant. Important issues ================ These issues are important enough to be mentioned here, but can be addressed as convenient. - The reported run-time performance can be improved. In particular the performance with date attributes seems scary and 2x slowdown relative to some other library in the 'most records are filtered out' case is also concerning. - I don't think it was satisfactory explained why 'attr' exists in two namespaces, as opposed to being a single type that is used for both formatting and filtering. Other notes =========== These issues seem important and should be considered, but might not even be fixable within the current design. - Several reviewers said the library is "too flexible" and this makes it harder to understand. Probably nothing can be done about that at this point, but interesting data point notwithstanding. - It was suggested that the library include an API that another Boost log may use in a way that permits plugging another logging library should end user of a Boost so desire. This seems a good idea, but I think it's up to Andrey to implement such API or not. - Alternative design approaches were proposed, in particular (i) permitting user log records and templating/basing other components on a user- defined record type and (ii) using compile-time indexing to access attributes. Also, it was proposed that named parameters not be necessary to use the library, and a more conventional interface be available. It does not seem that implementing those suggestions is fully possible without writing a different library from scratch, so it's up to Andrey to consider those proposals. - It was suggested to use newer Spirit to address poor compile times for the library itself. Thanks, Volodya _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost

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[Review] The review of the ITL library ends today, March 7th
by Hartmut Kaiser 07 Mar '10

07 Mar '10

Hey all, The review of Joachim Faulhabers ITL library ends today, March 7th 2010. Please get your reviews in today or get in contact with me to agree on some offline schedule. Regards Hartmut Review Manager --------------- Meet me at BoostCon www.boostcon.com

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[Review] ITL review extended until March 7th
by Hartmut Kaiser 28 Feb '10

28 Feb '10

Hey all, After getting the approval from our review wizards we decided to extend the review period of Joachim Faulhabers ITL library until March 7th, 2010. That should give everybody some more time to finish their reviews. Regards Hartmut --------------- Meet me at BoostCon www.boostcon.com

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[Review] ITL review planned to end tomorrow, February 28th
by Hartmut Kaiser 27 Feb '10

27 Feb '10

Hey all, We're almost at the planned end of Joachim Faulhabers ITL review (see the original review announcement here: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.announce/253) Now would be a good time to submit your reviews. If you need more time, please let me know. Regards Hartmut --------------- Meet me at BoostCon www.boostcon.com

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[Review] ITL review starts today, February 18th
by Hartmut Kaiser 18 Feb '10

18 Feb '10

Hi all, The formal review of the Interval Template Library (ITL) starts today, February 18th, 2010 and will end February 27th, 2010. ITL is being developed by Joachim Faulhaber. ------------------------------------------------ About the library: The Interval Template Library (ITL) is a library of interval containers that facilitates computations on collections of intervals and associated values. Use cases of such computations typically occur in the date and time problem domain, when collections of time intervals with associated data are analyzed, combined and aggregated. But the scope of applications for interval containers is more general and not limited to date and time problems. Interval containers allow to access and manipulate collections of intervals on an abstract level as sets and maps (of elements), but also to exploit segmental information that is given by the interval borders. Interval containers are fairly generic. They can be instantiated with discrete domain (or key) types like integral numeric types or boost::date or time types. But they also work with continuous domain types like double, rational or string. Using the latter allows to represent infinite sets and maps. The interface of the interval containers strives to be very intuitive and in line with the stl and other boost libraries. * The set theoretic operations union, difference, intersection and symmetric difference are available as operators for all interval containers and for many useful overloads between them. * There is iterator support on the level of segments and interval containers can be combined with stl containers of intervals via stl algorithms. * For discrete domain types, element iterators are available which makes interval sets and maps models of SortedAssociative Containers so they can be used with many stl algorithms. All interval containers are addable and subtractable. The addability and subtractability concept of the ITL leads to a general mechanism of aggregation on interval_maps which is called 'aggregate on overlap'. Exploiting 'aggregate on overlap' allows to compute many useful aggregation results in a simple and abstract manner. The ITL's Set and Map concepts are defined by a signature and collections of laws or axioms. Those semantical constraints have been validated using automatic law based tests. This gives the library both a well founded formal specification and an unusual thorough test base. The ITL emerged out of real world use cases and is successfully used at Cortex Software GmbH since a couple of years in the production code of various applications. On the boost developer's list it has been proposed in four previews and a review request since May 2008 and has been refactored and refined according to boost standards and suggestions from the list. The ITL is available from the boost vault: http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=itl_3_2 _0.zip&directory=Containers Documentation is online available at: http://www.herold-faulhaber.de/boost_itl/doc/libs/itl/doc/html/index.html The current sources are in the sandbox: https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/itl/ ------------------------------------------------ Everybody on this list is invited to participate in this formal review. I hope to see your review of this library, including your vote, and I welcome your participation in the discussions on the Boost mailing list. Please always state in your review, whether you think the library should be accepted as a Boost library. Additionally, please consider giving feedback on the following general 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? Regards Hartmut Review Manager --------------- Meet me at BoostCon www.boostcon.com

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BoostCon 2010 tentative, fully scheduled program available
by Hartmut Kaiser 06 Feb '10

06 Feb '10

Hey all, The first tentative, fully scheduled program for BoostCon 2010 is now available at http://www.boostcon.com/program. We're quite fond of this program and we believe it contains something for almost everybody. We hope to convince you to join us at BoostCon 2010, May 10-14th, in the beautiful Aspen. For registration, accommodation, and more information please visit the conference website at http://www.boostcon.com. Please note the reduced early registration fee! Regards Hartmut Program Chair BoostCon 2010 --------------- Meet me at BoostCon www.boostcon.com

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Boost release 1.42.0 available
by Beman Dawes 02 Feb '10

02 Feb '10

Release 1.42.0 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 one new library and numerous enchancements and bug fixes for existing libraries. For details, including download links, see http://www.boost.org/users/news/version_1_42_0 The release can also be downloaded directly from SourceForge. See http://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/ To install this release on your system, see http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_42_0/more/getting_started/index.html Thanks, --The Boost release team

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BoostCon 2010 preliminary program
by Hartmut Kaiser 01 Feb '10

01 Feb '10

Hey all, please find below a list of accepted submissions to BoostCon 2010. A tentative, fully scheduled program will be available soon. The keynote will be held by Maurice Herlihy. Maurice Herlihy is a computer scientist active in the field of multiprocessor synchronization. Herlihy has contributed to the design of concurrent algorithms, and in particular to the exposition and quantification of the properties and uses of hardware synchronization operations. He is currently (2009) a professor of computer science at Brown University and one of the leading visionaries in the field of transactional memory. Following up on this keynote we will have a full day sessions and panel discussion where we plan for 4 different groups to talk about their work on transactional memory (Mark Moir (Sun), Tatiana Shpeisman (Intel), Michael Wong (IBM), Vicente Botet (TBoost.STM)) In addition we have a high quality, distinctive, fully packed, and very diverse list of accepted talks: João P. R. Abecasis: Cross-platform development with Qt and Boost Ruediger Berlich: Distributed parametric optimization with the Geneva library Dean Michael Berris: Techniques in Flexible Header-Only C++ Network Library Implementations Michael Caisse: Using Spirit 2.1: Qi and Karma An Asio Based Flash XML Server Marshall Clow: A (proposed) MIME library for Boost Tony Van Eerd: The Basics of Lock-free Programming Joel Falcou and Jean-Thierry Lapresté: The Numerical Template Toolbox: BOOST'ed Generic Array Library for High Performance Computing Joachim Faulhaber: Boost.Alabaster (proposed): A Law Based Tester Barend Gehrels, Bruno Lalande and Mateusz Loskot: Generic Programming for Geometry Justin Gottschlich: TBoost.STM's Engine: An Efficient Software Transactional Memory Using Commit-Time Invalidatio Douglas Gregor: Clang: An Open-Source C++ Compiler Library C++ Tool-Builders Workshop Christophe Henry: Tutorial: The Meta State Machine Library V2 Ken Joyner: Revisiting Guidelines to Using Exceptions in C++ Hartmut Kaiser and Joel de Guzman: RAD Spirit Spirit History and Evolution Zachary Laine and Matt Calabrese: Instantiations Must Go! Stephan Lavavej: Data Structure Visualizers in Visual Studio 2010 Nevin Liber: Type Erasure Eric Niebler: Practical DSEL Design with Proto Roshan Naik: Logic Paradigm for C++ Stjepan Rajko: Patterns Library: a generic library for modeling, recognition, and synthesis of sequential patterns Gennadiy Rozental: Production use of Boost.Test David Sankel: Functional Programming in C++ Jeremy Siek: Generic Programming and the Boost Graph Library Robert Ramey: Is Boost Broken? Michael Wong: C++0x Update C++0x Concurrency We believe this program is reason enough to come to BoostCon this year (Aspen, CO, USA, May 10-14th)! For registration, accommodation, and more information please visit the conference website at http://www.boostcon.com. Please note the reduced early registration fee! Regards Hartmut Program Chair BoostCon 2010 --------------- Meet me at BoostCon www.boostcon.com

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[BoostCon 2010] Final Call for Participation
by Hartmut Kaiser 31 Dec '09

31 Dec '09

Please distribute! -------------------------------- 4th Annual Boost Conference 2010 -------------------------------- Aspen CO, USA, May 10-14, 2010, www.boostcon.com Final Call for Participation -------------------------------- Important dates: Proposal submissions Extended to January 3, 2010 Proposals decisions sent January 25, 2010 (tentative program available) Fully scheduled program available February 10, 2010 Session materials due April 15, 2010 -------------------------------- We invite you to submit session proposals to the 4th Annual Boost Conference: BoostCon 2010 (Aspen CO, USA, May 10-14, 2010). Traditionally the main face-to-face event for all things Boost (www.boost.org) BoostCon 2010 will present leading speakers from the whole C++ community. From using the Boost libraries to writing and maintaining them, from evangelizing to deploying Boost within your organization, from infrastructure and process to vision and mission, and the new C++ Standard, BoostCon brings together the sessions, the colleagues, and the inspiration to support your work with C++ and Boost in particular for the next year. To reflect the breadth of the Boost community, the conference includes sessions aimed at two constituencies: Boost end-users and hard-core Boost library and tool developers. The program fosters interaction and engagement within and across those two groups, with an emphasis on hands-on, participatory sessions. Session topics -------------- Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following: * General tutorial sessions introducing one or more Boost libraries * In-depth sessions on using specific Boost libraries * Case studies on using Boost * Experts panels * Advanced sessions on implementation techniques used within Boost libraries * C++0x and how it will change life for users and library writers * Development workshops to extend or enhance existing Boost libraries * Workshops on design process * Infrastructure workshops such as Build tools, Website, Testing * Concepts and Generic Programming * Hardware and infrastructure presentations focused on how libraries can make better use of the technology * Other topics likely to be of great interest to Boost users and developers Interactive and collaborative sessions are encouraged, as this is the nature of both the on-line Boost community and the style of learning and participation that has proven most successful at such events. Sessions can be tutorial based, with an emphasis on interaction and participant involvement, or workshop based, whether hands-on programming or paper-based, discussion-driven collaborative work. Session formats --------------- Presentations Presentations focus on a practitioner's ideas and experience with anything relevant to Boost and Boost users. Panels Panels feature three or four people presenting their ideas and experiences relating to Boost's relevant, controversial, emerging, or unresolved issues. Panels may be conducted in several ways, such as comparative, analytic, or historic. Tutorials Tutorials are sessions at which instructors teach conference participants specific Boost-relevant skills. Workshops Workshops provide an active arena for advancements in Boost- relevant topics. Workshops provide the opportunity for experienced practitioners to develop new ideas about a topic of common interest and experience. Author's Corner Presentations These were introduced at BoostCon 2008, and were a great success. They are short (30 minute) sessions, focusing on tips on usage and design. In addition, we're looking to uncover the hidden design gems in Boost libraries. Tool Vendors Presentations We actively encourage tool vendors and ISP's to submit proposals for a special Tool Vendors Session Track aimed at products related to Boost and C++ (compilers, libraries, tools, etc.). Other formats may also be of interest. Don't hold back a proposal just because it doesn't fit into a pigeonhole. Submitting a proposal --------------------- Standard Sessions are 90 minutes. You may submit a proposal for fractions or multiples of 90-minutes. Fractional proposals will be grouped into 90 minute sessions covering related topics. Longer sessions, such as tutorials and classes, will be assigned 90 minute, three hour (i.e. half day), or six hour (i.e. full day) time slots. Please include: * The working title. * Type of session: presentation, panel, tutorial, workshop, authors corner, vendor track, other. * A paragraph or two describing the topic covered, suitable for the conference web site. * Proposed length: 10-20 minute short talks, 45 minutes, 90 minutes, half day, full day. * Alternate lengths, if you are willing to make adjustments: 10-20 minute short-talks, 45 minutes, 90 minutes, half-day, full day. * Audience: users, developers, both. * Level: basic, intermediate, advanced. * A biography, suitable for the conference web site. * Your contact information (will not be made public). Submission details ------------------ All submissions have to be done through the EasyChair conference management system: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=boostcon10. If you have not already registered at EasyChair, you will need to do so in order to submit your proposal. All submissions will go through a peer review process. Authors are invited (but are not required) to submit PDF versions of full papers of up to 10 pages in ACM conference proceedings format (see http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates) The full papers are not required unless you want them published in the proceedings. All accepted proposals will be made available in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library (approval pending). Best papers, after further reviews, will be considered to be book chapters or journal articles in a renowned journal. The session materials go on the BoostCon website and will be available to attendees. For general information on the BoostCon 2010 paper submission or the scope of technical papers solicited, please refer to the conference website at www.boostcon.com. For any other questions about the submission process or paper format, please contact the Program Committee at boostcon10(a)easychair.com. If you have any technical problems with EasyChair, please contact EasyChair for help. Note: Presenters must agree to grant a non-exclusive perpetual license to publish submitted materials, either electronically or in print, in any media related to BoostCon. Hartmut Kaiser, email: hartmut.kaiser(a)gmail.com (Program Committee Chair) David Abrahams, email: dave(a)boostpro.com (Conference Chair) On behalf of the conference organizers

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