Vinnie Falco wrote:
On Thu, May 9, 2024 at 6:1 AM Boris Kolpackov via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:
... Boost baggage...you would have been able to drop a lot of baggage if you
were starting something like Boost2.
What you call "boost baggage" is what other companies and individuals call a robust mature codebase upon which they have built software with economic value. Perhaps these battle-tested components can be dropped but the users who rely upon them would also be "dropped."
A "house cleaning" every 3 years has two problems:
1. It falsely implies that the "house" is "dirty". 2. The C++ world doesn't much embrace completely breaking working code at regular intervals.
In theory, if all you want is a repository of reference implementations, you can drop a library once it's accepted into the standard, or when it's rejected and the author no longer wants to pursue standardization. In practice, of course, once libraries acquire users, it's not so easy to just drop them.