Re: [Boost-users] Getting started with Boost: what did you need to know?

David Abrahams wrote:

Jim Douglas writes: Compared to many large-scale libraries, Boost is highly decoupled.

Such as...?

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IMHO it is high time that someone produced a dependency graph, or each library document had a "uses" section.

Do you know about http://www.boost.org/tools/bcp/bcp.html and its --report option?

I am aware of it, but the output is not very user friendly and AFAIK you cannot decouple the test functions to show what is required for "normal" use. [...]

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The ultimate solution would be to have a problem oriented section in the docs, i.e. if you are trying to do this, then we suggest you try these libraries. If we assume that each library was constructed in order to fill a need and/or solve a problem (and not just for intellectual amusement) then these needs/problems could be collated into a single section.

Yeah... some libraries are so general-purpose (e.g. lambda, mpl, preprocessor) that it's hard for me to say anything that most people will identify as their use case.

Does *anyone* use them?

But if you could be more specific -- i.e. write some of it -- then maybe the rest of us could pick up on what you're doing and see how it would work.

Hmm. I'll think about that - after 1.34 is released :-)

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4. The single word naming of the libraries can lead to ambiguities and misunderstanding e.g. "serialization" means different things to different people and requires a full paragraph to explain, and IMHO "thread" is somewhat misleading. Other names mean nothing to me so I have to go and look them up.

What would be better, "the boost serialization of a style espoused by Robert Ramey library?" ;-)

LOL. But I think you get what I mean. Jim