Fernando wrote:
There are different ways in which you can approach a concept-based design, but is clear that a good modern library must follow one. Do expect some crictizism regarding the specific approach to concepts you have taken, but FWIW I like it better than the CGAL approach (which is also concept based).
I welcome the criticism. I would like to learn some new things and improve on what I have done so far with the library. In particular I can probably do a few things to improve the error msgs people get when they hook things up incorrectly.
So one stated goal of your library is that it should be truly *generic*, meaning that a user should be abe to take some concrete facility and apply it to its own data structures.
Yes. I worry that if we took just the bottom layer (basic types) without any of the algorithms people would not be able to understand why I took the trouble to generalize.
The usefulness of the libraries is just the bait to get people to read the code and learn from it. Being useful is one of the stated requirements for any boost library, but you have a point. If the library is really cool in the way it is designed and implemented, then one could argue that its usefullness lies exactly
there.
These algorithms are of general usefulness to VLSI cad. They probably have applications in other fields (how many axis parallel rectangles do you see on your computer monitor every day?), but I can promise a great deal of interest will come from my industry. The primary problem with these algorithms is that it seems like an easy enough problem that everyone tries to solve it for themselves, but is actually hard enough that most people fail to do it right. I have just today learned of yet another such example from within Intel. I'm starting to loose count. That problem would be solved if there were a really good public domain implementation in a place like boost. Unfortunately, I have also learned that I may be forced to wait three months before being allowed to request at the department level that the source code be released. Once that is done, I will be allowed to hurry up and wait for the corporate level process. I'm afraid I can no longer be optimistic about how long it will take before I can upload the code. I'm working every angle I can think of, however. Luke