From a distribution point of view, I see some big problems too. I guess the idea, if I understand correctly, is to distribute your binding generator along with the select-few boost header-only libraries, and then, the user would have to run the binding generator for his particular platform to generate the implementation-detail binding headers of those boost library
Personally, I find this proposal very scary. I'm just gonna give my opinion on this, make what you want of it. One little thing, I'm not sure that STL11 is a particularly good name for this, since most of the new C++11 libraries would not be classified as "STL" libraries (except for unordered containers and <array>). But that's just a trivial issue of terminology. You state in your readme for your generator: ".. or write some brittle bindings which manually replicate STL items .." In my experience, what can make those kinds of manual bindings brittle are all those subtle incompatibilities (often undocumented) between analogous components of the alternative implementations. It's not hard to take a list of standard components and turn that into a list of using statements / typedefs / aliases within a new namespace, because such lists are not that long in general (20 to 50 things per header, at most) and it's not hard to do this well and to maintain them. I find that there's nothing particularly brittle about that "human process". Replacing that process with a reg-expr generated automatic process can only make it more brittle, with very few benefits, and might require significant tinkering until it works reliably, and I don't care how smart that generator is (using clang's AST lib or not), I cannot see this becoming more reliable than a hand-written and actively maintained equivalent. And after all that, it does not address the main weak point of such bindings, which is, as I said, dealing with the subtle incompatibilities and platform-specific quirks. ports. Or, if you want to spare the user from having to do this, then you must distribute a specific version of all the headers that will work for their particular platform (OS, compiler and std-lib implementation) and the particular versions of those platform components. Either way, this is a distribution nightmare. As for "forking" boost based on this, I don't understand why this is necessary, or maybe I don't quite understand what it is meant to really involve. Most boost libraries already contain a significant amount of conditional code and workarounds to deal with platform-specific issues or to use beneficial features that only some platforms support (including C++11 features). Why would it be necessary to have a completely separate version or distribution of those libraries that are targeted at platforms with the (mythical) feature-complete C++11 library implementation? That is, if you really mean to "fork" the boost libraries in that way, there is going to be enormous costs associated to doing that, mostly in terms of maintenance and man-power. I think that a much better alternative strategy is to do what boost has done with Boost.TR1. Why not create a library wrapper like Boost.TR1 but for C++11/14? Isn't that what users want, i.e., to be able to use standard C++11/14 library components and not have to worry about running their code on platforms that don't support it or only partially? I mean, people who use Boost.Thread today, instead of <thread>, use it because it works everywhere. But if they could include something like <boost/cpp11/thread.hpp>, and use "std::thread" and friends, then the only remaining platform-specific work would be to install and link against libboost_thread for platforms that do not provide the standard <thread> library. An additional way of doing this is to simply require that the maintainers of the libraries that have been standardized to update their library such that it binds to the standard C++11 library implementation (as thinly as possible) whenever available and sufficiently compatible (I think that most of the boost libraries are today, they seem to have recovered from all the mayhem following the C++11 standard and all its slight differences w.r.t. Boost). In other words, if you include <boost/thread.hpp> on a feature-complete C++11 platform, it should do little more than include <thread> and bind its components to the boost namespace. In both cases, the responsibility of maintaining the C++11/14 compatibility in those boost library rests on the shoulder of the individual maintainers. No forks required. And the local bindings (generated or not, from boost to std or vice versa) can be maintained more easily. Incompatibilities and other platform-specific can be dealt with more practically by manually maintaining the bindings. And users simply need to be advised about what features a platform should have to allow a specific boost library to be used standalone and / or without having to install and link to a pre-compiled library. Maybe I completely misunderstood your goals, and all I said are things you had already considered. I hope so. This is just the way I see things. Hearing the words "fork" in the same sentence as "boost", gives me chills... (unless it means "fork" only in the sense of a temporary developement branch that is meant to be merged back quickly). Mikael.