On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 12:39:14 -0500, David Abrahams wrote
Yes, I expect major changes over time. Many libraries in boost have evolved significantly over time as users adopt and run into issues that cannot be fully anticipated in reviews. Iterator adaptors comes to mind as a library that, in theory, it's current state could have been fully analyzed up front.
Well, it's not perfect yet, by any means.
Sure, but even the old 'bad design' was a useful advance.
But, in fact, it took usage and a major refactoring, including interface changes, to get to the current design.
Yes, and that was an *enormous* effort involving many months and three people. Major redesigns are very hard, and usually they seem to require the original library author to become extremely uncomfortable with the limitations and/or problems of the original design.
No question that (re)design is hard. One of the ways that authors get uncomfortable is others apply the library in various projects and run across report various limitations. Users suggest and submit enhancement ideas -- sometimes fully coded. And, of course, this can happen even if the library is rejected -- it's just that the user audience will be smaller. And that assumes that Andreas would decide to continue working on it...
Filesystem is another evolving library -- it solves real problems for many current users, but it doesn't do everything people want.
Yeah, but what we're talking about here probably involves more than just evolutionary development. The performance limitations of this design are built into the structure of the library, IIUC. And IIUC the author has given no indication he intends to address that issue other than by explaining that there's no way to do so while maintaining the other design goals. Please correct me if I'm wrong, anyone.
I haven't read every last word, of the reviews, but what I did read seemed like a mostly healthy interchange of possible ideas and limitations with various approaches. No matter the final implementation the fsm concepts and background will stay the same. And perhaps the any new interface becomes different interface. I'm unsure if the various approaches can be unified...
I want to be clear that I don't have a vendetta against this library or its author. I do think it's important to be realistic about what's likely to happen to it if it's accepted.
Understood. There are basically 3 options from this juncture -- accept the library unconditionally, reject, accept with limitations. I think what I was hoping is that some sort of consensus could emerge which would allow a path to acceptance with conditions that would satisfy the folks that want to reject and would also work for Andreas. Ultimately it will be up to Pavel's judgement...
Did I miss something? We reviewed a fixed-point decimal library??
Yes, in 2003. Mr Seymour choose to walk away after the library was rejected. The history is here: http://www.boost.org/more/formal_review_schedule.html Jeff