On 30 June 2012 16:19, Lars Viklund <zao@acc.umu.se> wrote:
Seriously though, are you proposing that anyone that has to use C++03 should be locked for all eternity at some ancient Boost version, even though there's functionality in newer ones they very much would like to use?
I don't see how they are stuck on an ancient version of Boost. It just means there are some libraries they can't use. At some point in the future, they will be stuck. But it will be gradual, not abrupt. Just as has been done for those "dialects" (for lack of a better word) of C++ embodied by gcc before 4.2, Visual Studio before 8.0, etc., eventually you don't get supported.
Should we doom a large majority of developers to keep personal patch sets against their Boosts, resulting in a largely fragmented and impossible-to-handle ecosystem?
I don't see how adding C++11 only libraries to Boost has this result.
I see this primarily from an end-user support and end-user perspective, not as any library author or release mangler.
What I don't understand is how people who have the ability to upgrade both Boot boost and compilers (you have to, because Boost periodically drops support for old ones) don't have the ability to ever turn on the C++11 flag. (Other than some pathological cases, like having multiple targets for a product where you have to wait until all your various compilers and libraries catch up with each other). It's a burden to target two different languages (even with one being close to a superset of the other), and I'd rather see C++11 only libraries than no libraries because that burden is too high. Because that is the choice we have to make. Right now that burden is too high for boost.lockfree. If that burden gets lower (by, say, someone so concerned that Boost is going to drop C++03 support that they take over boost.atomic), by all means add C++03 functionality (and I believe the author is certainly willing to do so). The purpose of C++ standardization is not to fragment the community, but to grow it and push it ahead. If it ends up fragmenting, either we didn't put enough effort into backwards compatibility (blocking people from moving forward) or way too much effort into backwards compatibility (people just don't care to move their code bases over to C++11). -- Nevin ":-)" Liber <mailto:nevin@eviloverlord.com> (847) 691-1404