On 1/12/2018 12:43 PM, Niall Douglas via Boost wrote:
SG14 the low latency study has been looking into how to improve some design decisions in <system_error>. The relevant WG21 paper is https://wg21.link/P0824 and recent discussion can be found at https://groups.google.com/a/isocpp.org/forum/#!topic/sg14/j7tQybEjP5s.
What we'd like to do is to test whether some very mildly breaking changes to <system_error> are so mild as to affect no users, and on that basis propose WG21 to make those mildly breaking changes to <system_error> in the next C++ standard. And to test this, we'd like to modify Boost.System with those mildly breaking changes, ship a release and see how many users complain. If it is zero, we have evidence for WG21 that this is not a consequential change.
The usual way is to announce the upcoming change in release nnn and then make the change in release nnn + 1. What is wrong with using this method in your case, if all parties are in agreement to do it ?
What we'd like to change is this:
1. Stop treating code zero as always meaning success irrespective of category. This remedies a defect where some custom error code domains cannot be represented by error_code due to using value 0 for an error. In actual code, I've never seen anyone ever use comparison to anything but a default constructed error code, so I think this will be safe.
2. Success becomes solely the default constructed error code, which is code zero and a new category of "null_category". This is internally represented by { 0, nullptr }, and thus makes the default constructor trivial which is highly desirable as it eliminates any compiler magic static fencing for the default constructor. Right now the default constructor uses system_category with value 0, and I suspect no code will notice this change either.
3, Make the default constructor constexpr, now possible. No code should notice a difference, except less runtime code will be generated.
4. error_code::message() returns a std::string_view instead of std::string if running C++ 17 or better. This lets us remove the <string> dependency, and thus stop dragging in half the STL with <system_error> which in turn makes <system_error> actually useful to the embedded systems crowd. The guess here is that std::string_view has such excellent interoperation with std::string that I think 99% of code will compile and work perfectly without anybody noticing a thing.
I appreciate that this would undo Peter Dimov's excellent work at having Boost.System alias <system_error> under C++ 11 and later. I also appreciate that we are deliberately going to potentially break end user code. But my personal guess is that in practice, the breakage will not be noticed by 99% of code out there right now. It'll just compile against the improved Boost.System and everything will work as before.
Boost was originally intended as an incubator for C++ standard changes. This ticks that box perfectly.
Thoughts on feasibility?
Niall