On 10 Jun 2009, at 16:39, Sid Sacek wrote:
John and Pete,
I do appreciate your insights into the inner workings of the Boost community. I'm not discouraged about the lack of interest in my suggestion, but I was somewhat surprised. Boost libraries are one of those things that make life better for programming engineers. I believed that was the unwritten philosophy behind Boost, to "Make Life Better." Extending that philosophical notion, the Boost libraries would also know about the shortcomings of compilers and operating systems and help to improve their performance as well, simply because it "makes life better."
I suppose I must have been mistaken about that... perhaps not everybody in the Boost community has feelings of magnanimity and charity.
The big problem I have is that there is no evidence that #pragma once would actually help in practice. It helps in some super-special case, involving 200 basically empty files that all include each other and nothing else. I suspect (without any evidence) that if someone came along and said "I added #pragma once to the boost headers, and it sped up compilation by X% on windows, and didn't slow things down on linux / mac os x, and it didn't break any test or library", they might well get a less luke-warm response. Chris