On Friday 12 March 2010 13:00:31 Barend Gehrels wrote:
Dmitry Goncharov wrote:
Barend Gehrels wrote:
Andrey Semashev wrote:
No, the library has to be compiled anyway. However, if your application is a single .exe module, you can link statically with Boost.Log and other libraries.
OK, I must say that I'm not so happy with that. What is the reason for the need to compile? Logging is very useful, but to statically link only because of logging is in many cases not convenient.
There was a report that it had taken about 20 minutes to compile the lib. Do you really want to spend 20 minutes each time you compile an application which uses the lib? Or would you rather compile the lib once and then link against it?
That also sounds not good.
However, what might happen is that if there is an attractive logging library, Boost library writers start to use it, of course. All libraries using the logging functionality will need compilation. I normally use only header only libraries from Boost (sometimes making an exception). So this scenario might cause me stopping using Boost... There are much more people using only header-only Boost headers.
It might be even worse. If *existing* libraries will start using Boost.Log in an update (because it is really useful), existing project files and solutions will be broken.
And finally for me the worst case scenario: if *existing *libraries *used in Boost.Geometry* will start using Boost.Log in an update, our Boost.Geometry library is broken and not header only anymore.
That is the reason that I'm really not happy with this, and I think it should be fixed.
I believe that discussions about header-onlyness and relative merits thereof happened on this list before, and probably more than once, and it's safe to assume that no conclusion can ever be reached. Which probably means that the decision is with the author(s) of each individual library. - Volodya