Hey everyone, It's been a while since I've made an appearance on this list, but I was contacted regarding the recent discussion of concepts here and Lorenzo's taking the reins of a concept library, and decided to poke my head in. First, I apologize to the community for not getting Boost.Generic on the sandbox earlier (if you are unfamiliar with Boost.Generic, see my 2011 BoostCon talk http://blip.tv/boostcon/boost-generic-concepts-without-concepts-5262126 and/or the corresponding slides https://github.com/boostcon/2011_presentations/raw/master/thu/Boost.Generic.... ). I've gotten numerous emails about it since 2011 and I decided to commit the current state of Boost.Generic to the sandbox today. It is still based on the "old" concepts of C++0x with pseudo-signatures. You can find it in the "generic" subdirectory of the sandbox. That said, I'm not sure anyone even cares about Boost.Generic anymore given that the standard seems to be diverging from how it originally was approaching concepts, but here it is anyway. Similarly, I'm not sure there is any interest from people for me to continue developing Boost.Generic, so I guess this is a check for interest again. And, very briefly, without getting too political here (not that my opinion has any bearing) but I personally do not agree with some of the recent design changes for what may turn out to be C++1y concepts -- specifically I think pseudo-signatures were better overall and the C++0x form of associated types was much more useful than what is currently described, especially concerning associated type deduction, which no longer appears to be possible. But I don't think this discussion is suitable for the Boost mailing list and I don't want to ruffle too many feathers beyond that, so I'll take that elsewhere. For this reason, though, I [currently] do not have a desire to support that form of concepts in my library, though I do plan to resume work on Boost.Generic. A recap of what's gone on since my Boostcon talk, for anyone who even remembers it -- I haven't been actively developing Boost.Generic for over a year as I have been busy with other things, but coincidentally in the past couple of weeks I've gone back to it and decided to update some things due to a trick I realized I could use to get full compatibility with the C++0x working paper for explicit concept map templates (N2914's 14.10.3.2 paragraph 3 highlights why it's non-trivial, see http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2009/n2914.pdf). Since then, I've had renewed interest in the project and have updated various facilities. Stuff that changed since my presentation back in 2011 -- it now supports variadic concepts using the syntax ,,, (see line 28 of boost/generic/std_concept/concepts/predicate.hpp for a simple example). All 135 of the concepts from N2914 are now implemented, though not all are working, especially ones that are not auto and use refinement (I'm still in the process of making the concept map backend changes). All of the std_concepts/concepts tests should be working, and same with std_concept/support_concepts tests, with GCC and Clang only failing on FreeStoreAllocatable (in slightly different ways). I'm updating some of the implementation to use the new Boost.Preprocessor variadic macro support that didn't exist when I started development, and Boost.Generic now also is starting to use Edward Diener's variadic_macro_data_library that's in the sandbox. I've only recently test on GCC 4.7 and Clang 3.1, both with libstdc++ on Windows. I don't think any other compilers will be able to handle it because of the amount of C++11 features currently in use... Visual C++ in particular will likely have no chance of compiling ANY of it, even if you use the fully preprocessed form of the library that I provided on the sandbox. Specifically, I currently require the updated C++11 SFINAE support, variadic templates, and template aliases, among other features which I don't believe Visual C++ yet supports. If you want to see how to use the library, for now you'll have to watch the talk, look at the slides, and/or go into generic/test/libs/generic/test/std_concept and examine the tests that are there (the latter will probably be the most enlightening in terms of using the predefined concepts). As for the tests, the ones you should look at if you want to understand how to use the predefined concepts are in the test directory's std_concept/concepts and std_concept/support_concepts subdirectories. If you want to see the syntax for creating your own concepts, the ones in std_concept/concepts are the best choice to look at, as they are simple and most do not require compiler intrinsics, unlike the support_concepts which rely on C++11 type_traits and the C++0x std::True concept. I also recently integrated Boost.Wave support to easily generate preprocessed versions of all of the concepts in the library. You can use the preprocessed headers, including Dave's suggested #line support, without having to run Boost.Wave yourself. To do this you just define a couple of macros when you build the tests. This decreases build times by over 50% on both Clang and GCC -- the tests for me in Clang go from over 7 minutes to just over 3 minutes if I use the preprocessed headers. To activate this support you need the two defines in the following format (easiest to just define them via the command-line) // NOTE: Do not use quotes around the path -- also realize that the path ends in the middle of the word generic, This is necessary. #define BOOST_GENERIC_PREPROCESSED_ROOT put_your_COMPLETE_path_to_boost_sandbox_here/generic/include/boost/gen // Also #define BOOST_GENERIC_USE_PREPROCESSED_HEADERS This will use completely preprocessed concepts, with errors properly pointing to the non-preprocessed headers, and effectively gets rid of all of the "from macro invocation" notes you'd see in clang and gcc 4.8 whenever you hit one of the Boost.Generic generated static_asserts in the non-preprocessed form. It is recommended that you use the preprocessed form unless you are making changes to the library-provided concepts, since compile-times are greatly reduced by using them and error messages are improved. Anyway, as I said, I do not personally like the direction that concepts seem to be going and so I do not currently have much of an interest in implementing what is currently proposed, however, buried somewhere in the source of Boost.Generic I believe is an early implementation of the library that was more similar to how concepts are specified in N3351, though I stopped maintaining it a long time ago -- it allowed for the specification of givens and arbitrary expression matching similar to the current design, with a brief demonstration given in my 2011 Boostcon talk (slide 20: https://github.com/boostcon/2011_presentations/raw/master/thu/Boost.Generic....). It might be useful to revive this now that standard concepts may be going in that direction, but again, I do not think this is a good idea and was why I was convinced by others to switch development to pseudo-signatures to begin with. -- -Matt Calabrese