Provisional Dissonance wrote:
While I understand that the BGL is deeply entrenched in boost culture, certain academic circles, and even publications, I nonetheless suggest that BGL lacks the ease of use necessary for widespread adoption.
I think one of the biggest issue with BGL is documentation. Specifically, there reference is really lacking -- for example, try to figure out what the 'make_label_writer' function does and in what header it's defined. I remember that I had similiar question about a bunch of other functions, too. Another issue is that I never seem to remember how event visitors work and have to look it up in documentation, which invariably requires looking at 3 or 4 separate pages. My favourite problem is external property maps. I really think that I should be able to just run topological_sort(G, back_inserter(order)); and don't bother if 'G' has vertex_index_t property or not. Currently, if I use anything else than vecS for vertex storage, the above code won't compile. Generally, most of the time I assume that all vertex descriptors are integers, and don't try to write really generic code, because I suspect it too much work. I should admit that basic operations like iteration over adjacent vertices are fine -- they are a bit verbose, but it's not a big problem.
digraph<some_node_type,some_edge_context_type> g; g << "vertex" << make_pair("vertex", "implicit_vertex"); g.add_edge("brother", "sister", "sibling"); if(g.find(make_pair("brother", "sister"))) related = true;
Could someone please elucidate on why it is impossible/impractical/unnecessary/whatever for a graph library to have such an interface? Should I accept that the BGL is not the magic bullet graph library and move on, or can this kind of simplicity be somehow found within?
To tell the truth, I have no idea how to specify vertex properties when adding vertex, so maybe this is the thing to improve first. We might have: add_vertex(g, "brother"); we can also have a way to find a vertex with specific value of specific property: find(g, vertex_name, "brother") - Volodya