Re: [boost] [review][variant2] Variant2 Review Starts April 1

wt., 26 mar 2019 o 17:46 Matt Calabrese via Boost napisał(a):

On Mon, Mar 25, 2019, 12:33 PM degski via Boost wrote:

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In my view there can only be one objective with boost varant2, and that is if it is decided [here] that it is (much) better than the current std::variant, the C++20 std::variant should be/become the proposed boost::variant2.

I don't think that's realistic based both on how the committee operates and specifically on what happened with std::variant standardization. The high-level design approach that variant2 takes was discussed during standardization, but it differed from the proposal that was moving forward and did not get consensus. Even if the standards committee were to now decide that std::variant *should* be changed, it would be a breaking change of a kind that the committee has historically had a hard time doing, even when it comes to fixing design bugs. I just don't see std::variant changing here.

Separately, I don't think it is a problem that there are multiple variant-like type implementations. Over the past couple of years, people seem to have become a little bit too enamored with the notion of a "vocabulary" type and take it further than is healthy. std::variant can still be the "vocabulary" type in its current form and that's okay. We have multiple sum types in boost and in the standard and in proposals (optional, variant, expected). That's fine just as it is fine (and healthy) that we have multiple containers. std::variant can still be a "vocabulary" type just in the sense that std::vector is a vocabulary type.

With std::variant standardization the discussions often centered around two competing and valid views with different trade-offs. One view was that a variant should never be empty (like boost::variant). The other view was that it is okay for there to be an empty state and that it can lead to a simpler and more efficient implementation (which can be true, but leads to a type with more states/weaker invariants). In the standard we ended up with a compromise that had an empty state that we *sometimes* try to avoid, but that actually can have negative performance and binary size implications for some operations, but some operations like assignments can potentially be faster and the type can be smaller. That's just what the committee ended up with in the presence of people shouting from different sides, along with a fair share of misunderstandings of the basic exception guarantee. As long as the committee wants exactly one type, I suspect it won't be able to do anything drastically different in either direction. Peter's variant can live here as the fully realized never-empty variant, and there can hypothetically be the opposing realization (i.e. something that goes to the other extreme and doesn't do anything to avoid the empty state ever, but has operations with strong preconditions -- I've even started implemented one even though I'm more fond of never-empty variants

https://github.com/mattcalabrese/argot/blob/master/include/argot/discriminat... ).

As long as there are non-trivial trade-offs for any type/template, there will be reasonable users who would opt for different trade-offs when in different domains. We just have to decide which combinations of the trade-offs are worth collecting into a facility that is present in boost or the standard or elsewhere.

True. And maybe names of different variants of variant should reflect the different trade-offs. Maybe noempty::variant rather than variant2::variant? Regards, &rzej;