On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Christopher Jefferson <chris@bubblescope.net> wrote:
On 28 May 2009, at 22:45, Emil Dotchevski wrote:
On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 2:31 PM, Daniel James <daniel_james@fmail.co.uk> wrote:
Although, you can add me to the people who are currently happy enough with the status quo.
Me too, I don't understand what would this reorganization improve. What would make sense for me personally would be an effort to reduce physical coupling in Boost, by moving as much code as possible from headers to CPP files.
Out of interest, how would this help? The majority of libraries make no attempt to maintain a stable API from version to version, so the only gain I could see would be reduced compile time. Useful yes, but not obvious helping maintence?
It would help maintenance in two ways: - by minimizing the number of compilation units that need to be recompiled when making a change - by minimizing the amount of code that's visible to the compiler for each compilation unit when it does need to be recompiled
Also, so many (all?) libraries use templates, which won't go into cpp files.
Many function templates have parts that don't depend on template parameters and could be separated in a cpp file. Also, many Boost headers contain regular (non-template) inline functions, because there's pressure from users (and developers) to keep Boost libraries header-only. Emil Dotchevski Reverge Studios, Inc. http://www.revergestudios.com/reblog/index.php?n=ReCode