The review of Oliver Kowalke's Boost.Coroutine library starts today, September 3rd 2012, and will end on September 12th. I really hope to see your vote and your participation in the discussions on the Boost mailing lists!
Please always state in your review, whether you think the library should be accepted as a Boost library!
YES, I think it should be accepted.
Additionally please consider giving feedback on the following general topics:
- What is your evaluation of the design?
Overall, I like the design. coroutine class design is very good. As others have pointed out, it has some sharp edges (e.g. accessing coroutine-function arguments after first yield can cause access to bad memory) but I think that it is not a showstopper. I view coroutine class as a more advanced usage so some caution will be required. I would like to see symmetric coroutines in the future, though. I spent most of the time studying generator class. I think generators are easier to grasp and thus will be used more often (especially by novices). Like outlined in the previous posts, I would like to have generator-functions return void (Oliver already implemented this on a branch); have iterator support for use with algorithms and BOOST_FOREACH/C++11 range-based for; and address the danger associated with using pointer/reference types (either change the design or clearly document them). I also agree that having support for memory allocator (beside stack allocator) is a good idea and that they should both be type erased.
- What is your evaluation of the implementation? I did not study it in great detail but what I saw was of very good quality.
- What is your evaluation of the documentation? Good. There are some mistakes but others have already pointed them out.
- What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library? Extremely useful. Should make event based applications easier to write. Will greatly simplify writing stateful iterators.
- Did you try to use the library? With what compiler? Did you have any problems? Yes. I used GCC 4.6.3 with no problems. I tried Clang 3.1 but it fails to compile -- simply including boost/coroutine/all.hpp generates errors.
- How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A quick reading? In-depth study? I spent a few hours studying the library, experimenting, reading background info (e.g. Giovanni's original documentation).
- Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain? Only in that I have used generators/coroutines in Python for a number of years. I have also written many event based applications in C++ and can appreciate the need for coroutines in that domain.
Regards, Eugene