Gennadiy Rozental wrote:
Wave is not just a tool, if one defines a tool as just a program to run with some command line options, or a GUI in which one fills in some dialog and runs. While Wave has a command line, it also has a programming interface
I am not saying it could not be used as a mean for creating custom preprocessor. But I do see it used this way only for some arcane and/or academic purposes, which IMO will cover quite small portion of it's users.
Agreed on that. But there are other libraries in Boost as well which 'suffer' from the same 'problem'.
And I do not see why the rest of us should be faced with library that will never be tested,
I don't know why you're so sure this library never will be tested. As I've said during the review I'm working on a test suite, which can be run as an integral part of the regression process. But please consider this to be not a simple task, so I'll need some additional time to fulfill my promise.
require comparatively advanced compilers and need to do actual compilation before it could be used
This is a real problem, and I'm aware of it. I assume you're interested in compiling Wave with VC6? I'm willing to work on that if there is only a real need in the community. Wave doesn't use any advanced C++ features which couldn't be replaced for older compilers. So I'm pretty confident that this could be done.
, with very limited understanding from majority of the community how it's working. While instead we could have excellent tool that works with all compilers, delivered in a format desirable by majority of it's users without need for compilation and simple usage docs.
I don't see how the tool could be 'excellent' if the library the tool relies on is not. And I think it shouldn't be a problem to provide precompiled binaries along with the boost releases on some major platforms. Perhaps this would help to remove your initial concern?
I guess an ability to create a custom C++ preprocessors (when even to start using wave this way one needs to be an expect in C++ preprocessor standard) is not compelling enough for me to justify an inconvenience for the majority of the users.
What inconvinience are you actually facing? Sorry, but I did get it yet. Regards Hartmut