Peter Dimov wrote:
Robert Ramey wrote:
The library standard doesn't "work". It can't. It's not code. The standard doesn't include an implemenation. And once we have a reference implementation which can be compiled on a language conformant compiler, what is gained from the work required to add it to the standard?
Wider audience, multiple competing implementations, availability. You can depend on the standard library being available for use even if for administrative/legal/whatever reasons no third party code is allowed on a project.
Right, but standardization has disadvantages. It's set in stone in the sense that changes in future standards necessarily have backwards compatibility as an overriding concern. With add-on libraries, things can evolve in a much more reasonable manner - if someone is really tied to old behavior they can use an older version of boost. Consider the fiasco with std::vector<bool>. If it had been a boost library, it would have been fixed years ago! Cheers, Ian McCulloch