On Jun 2, 2015 5:07 PM, "Niall Douglas"
In other words, I think we're moving from an era of "many need this so we'll build it" into an era of "I think this is cool, so I'll build it and if one or two other people come to use it then great".
If I am right on that, it has profound consequences on what Boost is and how it works going into the future, especially as there is little incentive to buy into individual ivory towers from a user's perspective if that tower is locked into its maintainer.
I think you are misunderstanding these libraries a bit. These aren't really niche in the sense that they are highly domain specific or odd curiosities that are simply "cool." Both this and VMD (and mpl and preprocessor and fusion and proto, etc.) are general tools whose primary consumers are other library developers. I understand that you don't immediately see the "I need this library to accomplish X end goal," but that's because these libraries aren't of most use directly to the end user. If you are developing libraries, and especially if you are developing EDSLs, that's where these libraries shine and why they are so important. Saying that they are niche undersells them a bit. MPL and preprocessor, for example, are/were an important dependency of many other important boost libraries, despite most top-level users not necessarily even being aware (except in the crazy compile-time errors, heh). My point is, things actually haven't changed in boost, here. We have always embraced libraries that make it easier to develop other libraries. In my personal opinion, these are the most valuable kinds of facilities that boost provides, since their existence can make even higher-level libraries actually tractable when they may not have appeared so before. If you are stuck on not seeing a direct usage of a library for your average programmer, try to take a step back and think about what libraries you can build on top of the library now that such a facility is available. There have been a handful of examples already that are very compelling and it's not too difficult to come up with more -- the design of effectively any EDSL in C++ can be impacted by a library such as this.