Re: [boost] [optional] Safe optional

On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 2:42 PM, Andrey Semashev wrote:

On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 10:02 PM, Nevin Liber wrote:

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On 19 November 2014 02:37, Andrzej Krzemienski wrote:

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We would have people experiment with an alternative and decide which they find better, and they could deliver their opinion to the Standardization committee.

This can be taken to mean that you, the proposer of optional for the standard (and hence a domain expert), do not believe the design space has been sufficiently explored and the committee might be better off waiting and not putting std::experimental::optional into C++17.

I think you're taking it too negatively. It's very good that Andrzej is open to new ideas, especially since he's behind std::optional proposal. Exploring new approaches doesn't mean that the current optional is not well designed or not useful.

The thing with optional is that it is the first in a series of "wrapper" types: optional, expected, variant, any, clone_ptr, ... It would be wonderful to get it as "right" as the container + algorithm approach of STL. If it was just optional, I wouldn't care so much. But it is a much bigger class of, uh, classes. So, yes, someone, particularly a proposer, saying "maybe this is a better way", is a good thing, but does exactly say the design space has not been sufficiently explored. Stepanov had years, and a number of tries (with a number of languages) to get STL right. Tony