On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 01:12:34PM +0200, Markus Sch?pflin wrote:
If Boost doesn't work with pure <cxxx> headers then Boost is broken.
But it would require much effort to fix it. I know this is a pragmatic point of view, but I'm not sure if it's really worth the effort.
Since it would be effort to make Boost work for a highly-conforming compiler I'd say this particular work would be well worth it. The effort would pay off for other compilers in the future if they cleaned up their C headers. Easy for me to say though, I wouldn't be doing the work.
On the other hand, requiring users to compile in less-than-conforming mode would mean that some people using strict_ansi mode and writing perfectly conforming code cannot use Boost.
Ideally, boost should adapt to whatever mode the compiler is in. In theory, this should be possible as every switch defines some compiler macro:
-pthread => _REENTRANT -pure_cname => __PURE_CNAME -using_std => __IMPLICIT_USING_STD -std ansi => __STD_ANSI -std strict_ansi => __STD_STRICT_ANSI, also sets __PURE_CNAME
For thread support this is already done by boost.
Nice - it would be relatively* easy to use those macros to define/undefine the corresponding Boost macros. * relative to a very hard thing ;)
As I understand it, whatever flags are used by Boost must match the flags a user uses (maybe this only applies to compiled libs, not header-only ones), so one view would be that Boost should use the most commonly used set of flags. This might be the default - but then that uses nonstandard streams and implicit using directive for namespace std - eurgh! And in any case, "noone knows what most C++ programmers do".
Compiled libs would end up with yet more build variants. Header only libs could be made to adapt automatically, if one is willing to put enough effort into it. Which returns us to the question if it's really worth it.
Agreed, but that would mean users who don't use BJam would have to know which compiled lib corresponds to their set of flags - eurgh again. jon -- "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." - H.L. Mencken