"David Bergman" <davidb@home.se> writes:
David Abrahams wrote:
Oliver Kullmann <O.Kullmann@swansea.ac.uk> writes:
But for these "millions of C++ users" Boost is not the right choice.
It should be.
Oliver was talking about those millions of C++ users that "see no benefit in smart pointers", "see MPL as black art" etc. Right, Oliver? I really hope that Boost will not try to fit the needs of those less experienced developers, since that will, IMHO, inevitably make the library less useful for those of us who actually do type "make -k" now and then...
The usefulness of smart pointers and MPL for people has no correlation with whether they feel comfortable with make -k
The exciting thing about Boost is that it is Avantgarde, a good deal of interesting research(!), and not compromising on quality. That's at least my understanding of Boost.
We don't want to be Avantgarde/research; to the extent that we are, we need to fix it.
I agree with that, unless one replaces the "Avantgarde/research" with "for experts." I.e., I want Boost to remain a choice for C++ experts.
We never wanted to be the sole province of experts. We always wanted widespread usage. If you want to be a member of an exclusive "experts" club this is the wrong place to find it.
Most of those "millions of C++ users" that Oliver is refering to are actually quite junior C developers who have been forced to use some C++ keywords and OOP in order to exploit MFC instead of raw Win32 programming.
Yes.
And those developers already have MFC and ATL, and would probably only use 'shared_ptr' from Boost.
That's a good start.
What I am saying is that it would not be unreasonable to expect the targeted developers to actually type 'bjam', and perhaps even set the proper environment variables.
It would be unreasonable for some of them. I've worked with quite advanced and competent developers who are only comfortable in an IDE.
I do not think we have to flirt with the masses
Too late ;-)
- developers that would not use the facilities found in Boost anyway - in order to position it better for incorporation into future C++ standardizations.
Yes, we do. We need maximal adoption in order to be best positioned for standardization. Not just to get the libraries accepted, but also so they are really deserving of standardization. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com