May 2013 - Boost - lists.preview.boost.org

[heap] van Emde Boas tree
by Jeremy Murphy 07 May '13

07 May '13

Should I contact Tim Blechmann directly about the idea of adding a van Emde Boas tree to Boost.Heap, or is proposing it here the appropriate way to go about it? Thanks, cheers. Jeremy

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[any] Divergence between Boost.Any and standard library proposal
by Beman Dawes 07 May '13

07 May '13

A fresh draft of the proposal is up at http://beman.github.com/dot16/any-proposal.html In testing new any_cast examples, Boost.Any is handling one case differently from the proposal: any x; ... x = "Meow"; // x holds const char* This works fine with the Adobe implementation, but with the Boost implementation g++ 4.7.0 -std=c++11 reports: In file included from any_cast_test.cpp:5:0: c:\boost\trunk/boost/any.hpp: In instantiation of 'boost::any::holder<ValueType>::holder(c onst ValueType&) [with ValueType = char [5]]': c:\boost\trunk/boost/any.hpp:52:49: required from 'boost::any::any(const ValueType&) [wi th ValueType = char [5]]' c:\boost\trunk/boost/any.hpp:124:13: required from 'boost::any& boost::any::operator=(Va lueType&&) [with ValueType = const char (&)[5]; boost::any = boost::any]' any_cast_test.cpp:79:7: required from here c:\boost\trunk/boost/any.hpp:169:27: error: array used as initializer VC++ 2012 gets the same error, albeit with a much longer set of messages. AFAICS, the Adobe (and the proposed standard) behavior is preferred. The type does need to decay. Comments? --Beman

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[chrono/date] date conversion and arithmetic with unvalidated dates
by Vicente J. Botet Escriba 07 May '13

07 May '13

Hi, Note that N3344 suggest only day arithmetic for a day representation (which is always valid) and suggest only only a date representation. Could we apply arithmetic operations on a unvalidated date (without striving on UB)? e.g. day arithmetic on a ymd_date ymd_date d1(year(2013), may, day(66)); ymd_date d2 = d1 + day(1); If defined, which must be the value of d2? Could we convert a date representation to another one if the source date is unvalidated (without striving on UB)? e.g. ymd_date -> days_date ymd_date d1(year(2013), may, day(66)); days_date d2 = d1; If defined, which must be the value of d2? Best, Vicente

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[chrono/date] validated versus valid dates
by Vicente J. Botet Escriba 07 May '13

07 May '13

Hi, Allowing to build dates that are not validated doesn't mean that they are not valid. A validated date is always valid. E.g date d(year(2013), may, day(5)); d is not a validated date but is valid. Having a is_validated() function in addition to is_valid() could have its uses assert( ! d.is_validated() && d.is_valid() ); is_validated() function forces to use a bit to store this information on the date representation, but it improves the performances of the is_valid() function. Moving from a possible unvalidated to a validated one would need date d1; ... date d2(d1.year(), d1.month(), d1.day(), check); Instead of this a validate factory makes this clearer date d1; ... date d2 = validate(d1); date validate(date const& dt) { if (dt.is_validated()) return *this; else if (dt.is_valid()) { date res(dt); res.set_validated_(); // this is private return res; } throw bad_date(); } Best, Vicente

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Am I missing something or is Boost: String dictionary?
by david.hagood＠gmail.com 06 May '13

06 May '13

One of the libraries I work with (libXML2) has a very useful concept called a string dictionary, and I am surprised this doesn't appear to be in either STL or Boost. Am I missing something, or is Boost missing something? The basic idea is: Given you have a string and an instance of a dictionary, you can: 1) check if the string is already in the dictionary. 2) Add the string to the dictionary and return the dictionary entry (if the string is already present, return existing entry). The dictionary entries contain a copy of the string. Entries may be compared for equality/inequality in O(1) time. The lifespan of the strings in the entry is managed by the entry. This really simplifies writing parsers and the like, and is such a useful concept that I'm really surprised not to see it in STL or Boost.

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[GitHelp]github.com/boostorg/sandbox comment confusing
by Larry Evans 06 May '13

06 May '13

At: https://github.com/boostorg/sandbox there's a comment by Beman from 10 yrs ago saying: Removed as obsolete - use Boost.Random instead which makes no sense to me. Also, are any of the sandbox files from svn going to be moved to this github sandbox? TIA. -regards, Larry

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Fwd: GSOC:2013 Multiprecision Proposal Review
by Siddharth Jain 06 May '13

06 May '13

Please have a look at my proposal. The link to my proposal is http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2013/siddhart… and I have worked a lot on this proposal. Please suggest any changes which could be incorporated to improve this project. Regards Siddharth Jain

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Re: [boost] [gsoc-2013] Boost.Thread/ThreadPool project
by Niall Douglas 06 May '13

06 May '13

> Le 02/05/13 18:01, Niall Douglas a ?crit : > >> That's orthogonal. Boost.Asio provides the funding blocks. A nicer > >> interface that doesn't require an explicit continuation passing style > >> transformation can be built with Boost.Context or a similar library. > >> But it probably needs a future implementation that integrates with > >> ASIO, which is one of the point of Niall Douglas. > > Spot on. Especially as parts of ASIO are due to enter with TR2. I worry that > > a thread pool designed without ASIO in mind would become an orphan isolate. > What a ThreadPool must provide to satisfy the ASIO requirements? That's a very good question. And for me to answer in specifics I'd need to think deeply about the issue, and study examples, neither of which time currently allows given C++Now is just around the corner. All I can say right now - and I agree this isn't very helpful - is make it compatible with opaque third party event loop dispatchers such as Qt's QCoreApplication and QRunnable. Because Qt's implementation details iare opaque to external code, if you can meet compatibility with that you'll probably be compatible with anything Boost.ASIO can come up with, especially as most of Boost.ASIO is header defined. I appreciate that isn't very helpful. Thread pool design is hard :( Niall

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[config/multiprecision/units/general] Do we have a policy for user-defined-literals?
by John Maddock 06 May '13

06 May '13

Folks, I've been experimenting with the new C++11 feature "user-defined-literals", and they're pretty impressive ;-) So far I've been able to write code such as: auto i = 0x1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef_cppi; and generate value i as a signed 128-bit integer. It's particulary remarkable because: * It actually works ;-) * The value is generated as a constexpr - all evaluation and initialization of the multiprecision integer is done at compile time. * The actual meta-code is remarkably short and concise once you've figured out how on earth to get started! Note however my code is limited to hexadecimal constants, because it can't do compile time radix conversion - that would require a huge meta-program for each constant :-( This is obviously useful to the multiprecision library, and I'm sure for Units as well, but that leaves a couple of questions: 1) We have no config macro for this new feature (I've only tested with GCC, and suspect Clang is the only other compiler with support at present). What should it be called? Would everyone be happy with BOOST_NO_CXX11_USER_DEFINED_LITERALS ? 2) How should libraries handle these user defined suffixes? The essencial problem is that they have to be in current scope at point of use, you can never explicitly qualify them. So I suggest we use: namespace boost{ namespace mylib{ namespace literals{ mytype operator "" _mysuffix(args...); }}} Then users can import the whole namespace easily into current scope right at point of use: int main() { using namespace boost::mylib::literals; boost::mylib::mytype t = 1234_mysuffix; } 3) How should the suffixes be named? There is an obvious possibility for clashes here - for example the units lib would probably want to use _s for seconds, but no doubt other users might use it for strings and such like. We could insist that all such names added to a boost lib are suitably mangled, so "_bu_s" for boost.units.seconds, but I'm not convinced by that. Seems to make the feature much less useful? Many thanks in advance for your thoughts, John.

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[chrono/date] Performance goals and design summary
by Vicente J. Botet Escriba 05 May '13

05 May '13

Hi, After the discussion on other threads I would like to summarize some of my performances goals while refactoring the H.H chrono/date library, just to see if I was wrong and going on the bad direction: 1. *Be able to build dates without validating them.* 2. *I wanted the library to be as efficient as possible when the user uses constant objects or literals, no need to validate at runtime what has already been validated by the compiler*. 3. *Possibility to reassign a date if the parameters represent a valid date.* 4. *No a single date class is better than the others on all the algorithms*. 5. *No additional meta-data in absolute dates so that you don't pay for the relative dates overhead when using absolute dates.* 6. *The user must be able to get all the date related informations at once.* Do you have other? The way I have managed with these goals is 1. *P*rovide an unchecked date construction interface with a no_check_t parameter and an is_valid() function. 2. *T*he date parts day/month/year need to be validated or constructed with no_check_t. 3. dt.set_if_valid(year, month, day) 4. Define the Date requirements all the dates must satisfy, implement ymd_date, days_date, ... 5. Separate the absolute and the relative Date requirements into two Date concepts AbsoluteDate and RelativeDate. Provide at least a relative_date class based on the ymd representation. 6. Conversion between different concrete date classe. H.H approach respond to these goals in a different way 1. date and its parts provide constructors that are not validated, the validation is provided by factories as operator/. 2. I don't think this can be achieved when the date must be validated. 3. No problem, this could be added to H.H approach (at least for its YMD date). 4. Same approach. H.H proposes two classes chrono::day_point (only unchecked) and YMD date. 5. I'm not sure the date YMD class doesn't include meta data (Howard could you clarify your point here) 6. same approach. I have some questions for followed by my personal answer; * *Do you see some unnecessary goals, in particular, is the goal 2**necessary?* IMO, yes. Not providing an interface that allows compiler optimizations is against the C++ philosophy. The question is as always, what would be the gain? In the best case we could avoid 6 comparisons. * *Does the introduction of no_check to achieve goal 1 and 2 results in a uglier date interface?* IMO, yes, but I don't know how to achieve goal 2 without. * *Should a concrete date class provide just the functionalities it is able to do efficiently?* IMO, yes. This would prevent the user of non efficient services (Note that my current design doesn't follows this) * *Do we need a Date concept that a concrete date must model**?* IMO, yes. SO we need two levels, level one provides the most efficient service, level two provides an homogeneous interface. * *Do we need to make the separation between absolute and relative dates?* IMO, yes. While relative dates are powerful they incur on unwanted overhead when absolute dates are needed. Best, Vicente

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