Am 10.07.24 um 16:47 schrieb David Sankel via Boost:
For those who got involved in Boost within the last couple years, how did you hear about boost? What attracted you to it? Boost was used at the place I worked at when I was a student. I quickly came to love the idea of RAII which was implemented in Boost (mainly smart pointers combined with Boost.Move). C++11 was just around the corner with experimental support by a few compilers but I had to stick to C++98 for work. Boost.Move and generally many Boost constructs provided many benefits of C++11 in C++98. Digging through the headers (source code is the best documentation ;-) ) also helped to improve my C++-fu.
Later I discovered an intricate bug in Boost.Serialization which severely affected a work project. Finding what went wrong and why, how to reproduce and fix it was quite a fun challenge (multiple shared objects). Next I introduced Boost and especially Boost.Locale for UTF8-support of (especially) paths on Windows in other projects. By that I found the not-yet-Boost library Nowide and used the "standalone" version of it. Later I pushed to finally include it in Boost and became a maintainer of that and later Boost.Locale. This was also in wake of "Boost is so huge" arguments which I could counter with "all we need is in Boost already". So I loved to see Boost as a complementary standard library especially until broad support of C++11. Learning quickly that "untested code is broken" I did a lot of work on CI also in the context of Boost. What kept me here is the continuous learning opportunity by conversing with the other Boost developers. Alex PS: Also not affiliated with the C++ Alliance