Just a quick reminder that the containers lib review ends tomorrow - there have been lots of good comments, but not so many reviews - so now's your chance ;-) If there are any reviews pending that are likely to be late please let me know so we can extend the review period.
This review was sent to me privately, posted here for comment: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Review of Boost.Contianer by Zoltán Tóth I am not an expert of C++ containers topic, but use them daily in my algorithm programming job. C++ 1998 STL containers have serious deficiencies, I would say especially node-based STL containers are not usable at all for performance-critical algorithms due to their memory allocator treatment/requirements. I have written own implementations for STL vector, set, list, ., because I was not satisfied with STL containers. Therefore a replacement of those in Boost could be a terribly useful library. I did not try to use the library. I just quickly read the documentation, and found that it is very poor. Here are the deficiencies I have found in the documentation: 1. One of the most important reason to replace the STL containers is the treatment of custom memory allocators. However the documentation tells only a single sentence about it: "Containers support stateful allocators and are compatible with Boost.Interprocess (they can be safely placed in shared memory). " 1. It does not specify how the containers are swapped: are the allocators swapped with the container? 2. Most STL implementations have been supporting stateful allocators for years now. So it is not big news. However I am not satisfied with the way they might do it. For example Visual Studio's STL implementation require the allocator type to have a template copy constructor. Such allocator types are difficult to be implemented in efficient, threads-friendly way. (This is the reason I have implemented my own set implementation instead of STL::set) The documentation does not tell whether this library have a similar requirement. If no, that would be big news. 2. The documentation says: "All containers offered by Boost.Container can be used in recursive data structures, something that is not guaranteed by the standard". To understand the value of this feature better I as a user would like to know more about this topic. Please insert links or own text here that explain why does the standard not guarantee this. Is there any danger or difficulty in it? If yes: how does this library overcome them. IMHO Boost.Containers should not (yet) be accepted (because of the lack of a detailed documentation).