On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 9:08 PM, David Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> wrote:
I've been thinking for a long time that we need to develop a coordinated approach to developing some of these more "basic" facilities. We have too many great bits and pieces that don't quite interoperate as well as they could. This was driven home for me recently when I taught a course on Boost with hands-on workshops and the number of pitfalls that people (including me!) ran into was just too high. In order to really make the case for the power of library use, it needs to be easier to write expressive C++.
What would be helpful I think would be a statement of exactly what the problems are with the great bits and pieces and in what particular context they are considered problem(s). I think it would be easy to agree that we'd love to have everything in Boost work like it new every other library in it, but that makes Boost more a Framework than a library collection. I don't necessarily think that would be a Bad Thing, but rather too close a coupling for my taste.
I'm not sure exactly how to proceed from here. Maybe the first thing is to develop a list of things in (or that should be in) Boost that seem to fall into this category, because I don't really understand the rules my brain has used to decide the category boundaries. Maybe after that we need a "library domain maintainer" or something who can see to the coordination of these things... but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Here are the parts and topics that I see as being in the category:
result_of BOOST_TYPEOF range_ex BOOST_FOREACH our own implementations of std::containers (in interprocess, IIRC) lambda/phoenix/bind move semantics Boost.Iterator Boost.Algorithm segmented iterator support (http://lafstern.org/matt/segmented.pdf) property maps
Thoughts?
How about we first collect the problems you encounter and what other people already encounter with the specific libraries you've listed above -- and what precisely or roughly you'd like to achieve with coodinating the effort(s) of the above. Would it be safe to say you'd like to coordinate these to achieve true "expressive C++" with libraries? -- Dean Michael C. Berris Software Engineer, Friendster, Inc.