I agree. You point out two major failing of most C++ frameworks: lack of modern C++ use and lack of exception safety. I see the rest of this thread talking a lot about C++ techniques, but there seems to be one major component that everyone is overlooking: producing a good user experience.
Perhaps as a Mac developer I am more aware to the importance of a good user experience; one of the major failings of every cross-platform C++ framework on Mac OS is a poor user experience -- usually due to reinventing OS-provided UI wheels, and thus often making the UI subtly inconsistent with the rest of the OS. This kind of subtle (or less subtle) inconsistency is what makes users (entirely justifiably) bitch and moan and shoddy ports, and give bad product reviews.
umm... which part of "cross-platform" and "use native functionality" is more important?
You are falsely presenting them as mutually exclusive choices.
If you have some functionality provided by one OS, while another doesn't provide it... what do you do?
That case is actually almost completely irrelevant to my point. My point has to do with "reinventing OS-provided wheels", which is completely different from providing additional functionality on a particular OS.
case in point: FreeBSD doesn't provide the "lround()" C99 function - yet Linux does. If I need to round a double to a long, what function do I call that will be portable? The only real choice I have is to re-implement the lround() function so that at minimum, it gets enabled on FreeBSD. Given that I have had to implement a non-OS based version of a function, I then ask myself, "Why bother #ifdef'ing around the custom function - why dont I just use the one that I am providing?" Getting back to what was origonally said - if one platform implements something that another platform doesn't, how can a cross platform library not re-invent the the wheel for that crummy platform? In fact, Boost already does this - at configure/compile time bjam detects the available platform functionality - any missing bits are often provided by supplemental code. Yes I am presenting them as mutually exclusive - and I do realise that the world shouldn't be that way - but in reality, it is. Mathew