On Dec 3, 2007 10:57 AM, John Torjo <john.groups@torjo.com> wrote:
Hi all,
The formal review of the Boost.Functional/Forward library, proposed by Tobias Schwinger, begins today :
* What is your evaluation of the design?
Good. Simple enough to cover most needs. In my design I allow the user to specify if a specific operator() overload should be disabled or not (depending on the arity and the parameter types); It is useful if you are using more than one forwarder in some complex composition (i.e. as base classes) and you need to disable ambiguous overload. I do not think Boost.Functional/Forward should necessarily provide this functionality, but it might be considered. I think too that the library should optionally allow K more arguments which are all const or non const. For (uncommon) very high arity functions that need to be wrapped, you can usually live with this limitation.
* What is your evaluation of the implementation?
Looks simple, but it is hard to evaluate preprocessor meta code.
* What is your evaluation of the documentation?
Complete enough. I think it should be explicitly specified that the wrapped function object must be result_of compatible (if such a note is already present, I've missed it). A discussion of the impact of the library on compile time (especially with high values of N) would be useful. Also a comment on the (potentially lack of) runtime performance penalty imposed by the library would be nice.
From the documentation I cannot infer if operator() is overloaded for both const and non const 'this'. I think not (), but it should be specified explicitly. I have never needed this in practice, In fact, IMHO it should be specified that 'this' is always const.
* What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library?
Extremely useful. This is wheel which has been reinvented many and many times. Boost should be the supply a prepackaged solution.
* Did you try to use the library? With what compiler?
No.
Did you have any problems?
N/A.
* How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A quick reading? In-depth study?
A quick reading of the documentation and of the implementation.
* Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain?
Yes, I'm one of those which had to reimplement the wheel :).
* Do you think the library should be accepted as a Boost library?
Definitely! gpd