Mathias Gaunard wrote:
Gennaro Prota wrote:
Boost ("most expertly designed in the world", etc.)
It's a quote from someone which is quite known,
So?
it's not like it is being stated as being the truth.
Well, for it to be true it should make sense, first. What does "expertly designed" mean? Boost is a collection of components; there has been no "single design" anywhere (actually the only "design" choices affecting every component that come to my mind are terrible: e.g. those about the directory structure; or the usage of the same "detail" namespace for every library). And "expertly designed project" --as opposed e.g. to "expertly designed software"-- is simple nonsense to me.
It's a bit catchy, still, but is nowhere near as bad as the Apple advertisements, for example.
There's always someone who does worse :-) And everyone makes more or less ridicolous claims for quality (or conformity). In fact, the only quality I've seen is in projects where --by contract-- you pay money for defects and downtime (yes, let's stop calling it "bugs", as if they were pretty harmless annoyances making their occasional appearance here and there but with no substantial effect on a well working construction). What one would heartedly hope is for someone doing our job to be perfectly able to identify the false claims.
The "new" lexical_cast is a close friend, and there are simply authors who don't know where the house of simplicity is (looking at the source code of one of the tools I found boost::tuple used --which in turn meant type_traits, which in turn meant mpl, lambda and God knows what-- when std::pair would just do). I could continue for hours, really (but please don't ask).
Is it that important than some libraries depend on basic building blocks, even when they could use less flexible building blocks with a simpler implementation? A pair is simply the tuple of the poor.
I'm afraid that if I wanted to really reply to this I'd have to question your professional skills. Significantly. Which I don't want to do.
Are you concerned with the time to compile the thing, or simply with dependencies?
Are you aware of what dependencies imply?
At the end of the day, nobody is going to complain to anyone, because everything is "volunteer contribution". That may be humanly understandable, but don't expect to have quality in this kind of ecosystem ("patches are welcome", "if you notice anything wrong you can fix it" are easy escapes: you don't produce solid software by trial and error, nor you can really fight the mentality of an overwhelming majority).
What do you think the review system is for?
In Boost? Almost nothing. It depends on who happens to be around at the moment, who is interested in the library and how the review manager happens to judge all the feedback. And after something has been approved it can get completely changed without the slightest discussion (I'm speaking "against" myself here: I rewrote dynamic_bitset completely). And it isn't a review process; it's just an "if you have comments, please post". Many people will come up with good points but that's not the question. It remains that the whole thing is quasi-random. -- Genny