On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 3:15 AM, Jeffrey Lee Hellrung, Jr. <jeffrey.hellrung@gmail.com> wrote:

Local is ACCEPTED into Boost.

:)

After following the lively Local review discussion several weeks ago, and reviewing the discussion a second (and sometimes third) time, I have come to the above conclusion. There was quite a bit of passion on both the sides of "aisle", and thus, obviously, no decision I make would be well-received by all.

Let me start by summarizing the main arguments against including Local in Boost:

(a) Local functions are not very useful, at least in the presence of existing alternatives (e.g., namespace functions and Boost.Phoenix). (b) Local is really a portability library for C++03 presenting an imperfect emulation of features readily available in C++11. (c) Local's interface is primarily macro-based, making code ugly and difficult to read.

In my opinion as the review manager, a sufficient number of individuals in the discussion found the library "useful" to address (a) (sometimes with additional positive adverbs); indeed, at least a couple individuals have shared positive experiences with real-world use. Namespace functions require one to move code to somewhere other than where one may prefer to have it, and often requires a significant amount of boilerplate when binding local variables. Aside from any perceived issues with Boost.Phoenix's syntax and compiler error messages, it has been noted that binding member functions within Boost.Phoenix can get ugly. As far as (b) is concerned, the community seems pretty far from reaching a consensus on whether a library described by (b) belongs in Boost. There are certainly libraries currently in Boost that could be pegged to satisfy (b) as well, though they all have other mitigating features they make their situation different from Local in some way. As far as (c) is concerned, several have acknowledged that a macro-based interface is necessary to implement local functions in C++03, and it seems to have been generally agreed that, given this limitation, Lorenzo has done an admireable job making the interface as easy-to-use as possible. Some find it ugly, others find it reasonable.

In addition to the counterarguments of (a-c) above, the following facts weighed into my final decision: * Lorenzo has been engaging and in constant communication with the developer's list during the development of Local. This gives me confidence that he will continue to actively maintain (and improve?) Local. * The documentation is unanimously agreed to be of Boost quality. * The transition of some organizations from C++03 to C++11 may take several more years, and Boost has a history of supporting "ancient" compilers (for better or worse). The point being, a library that eases the transition from C++03 to C++11 has some merit based on current precedent. * There had been previous work on local functions by Alexander Nasanov and Steven Watanabe shared on the developer's list, suggesting a desire for this functionality for some time. * Local is approximately an extension of Boost.ScopeExit; indeed, it basically fulfills the request to Alexander Nasanov from the review result [2] of Boost.ScopeExit to create such an extension.

Lastly, my own opinion of "what Boost is" factored in here. I view Boost as *partly* a collection of general purpose libraries that can be used in wide variety of applications (and thus Boost frequently acts as a staging ground for standard adoption). Based on review feedback, I believe Local satisfies this criterion; and based on the mailing list discussion, I believe this view of Boost is not entirely inconsistent with others on the mailing list.

Thank you for the detailed explanation of the rationale of the decision.

Ultimately, it wasn't so much a # of "yes" votes versus # of "no" votes as it was the above general considerations. Regardless, I think independent of how the votes were counted, the "yes" votes outnumbered the "no" votes. This required some discretion on my part as not everyone who expressed an opinion submitted a formal review, and some participants were only arguing in favor of some specific point supporting either acceptance or rejection of Local.

My thanks to you and to the Boost community for clarifying two process questions I had during the review: 1) How to count votes-- not just yes vs. no but it's up to the review manager how to count and weight votes. 2) Should active authors' opinion count more-- yes if the review manager decides so. These points make sense to me.

"Yes" reviews (7) -------- Krzysztof Czainski Andrzej Krzemienski Pierre Morcello Nat Lindon John Bytheway Edward Diener Gregory Crosswhite

"No" reviews (3) -------- Vicente J. Botet Thomas Heller Hartmut Kaiser

Paul A. Bristow and Alexander Nasanov (the author of Boost.ScopeExit) both submitted reviews but did not express an opinion (as far as I could tell) on whether Local should be included in Boost, though if I had to peg Paul's, it would be to reject Local. From what I gathered, Joel de Guzman, Joel Falcou, Dean Michael Berris, and Lucanus J. Simonson were opposed to including Local in Boost (the aforementioned did not submit a formal review, though a formal review might be unnecessary if your vote is "no"). On the other hand, Brian Wood, Philippe Vaucher, Mathias Gaunard, Robert Ramey, Nathan Ridge, Brent Spillner, Thomas Klimpel, Christopher Jefferson, Daniel James, Rafael Fourquet, Matthias Schabel, and Robert Stewart participated in the discussion and argued in favor of some point that supported accepting Local in Boost. I want to be clear here that certainly not everyone in the aforementioned list even implied that they supported acceptance of Local (I would guess that only roughly half implied as much), but they indirectly helped its case by addressing arguments against inclusion. Overall, that indicates to me that more individuals support acceptance of Local into Boost than rejection.

[Apologies for any name misspellings and absent accents.]

My personal thanks to /everyone/ that participated to the discussions.

Regarding Boost.ScopeExit: 4 reviews were in favor of deprecating Boost.ScopeExit; 3 reviews felt there was nothing wrong with both Boost.ScopeExit and Local coexisting; and 3 reviews mentioned the possibility of improving Boost.ScopeExit with the features provided by Local's exits. As such I'm inclined to let Alexander (who opposed any kind of merging of Local and Boost.ScopeExit) work with Lorenzo on improving Boost.ScopeExit as he sees fit, and hopefully both libraries can address this apparent duplication of functionality within their respective documentation to avoid user confusion.

I will add void and this_ to ScopeExit (keeping it's compatibility with C++11 lambda style binding) and remove local exits from my library. (I will add a note to my library docs on how to use local function to easily implement scope exits with constant binding-- rarely needed.)

Regarding local::function::overload: Based on the review comments, it makes the most sense to add this to Boost.Functional.

I will move overload to Functional.

Regarding BOOST_IDENTITY_TYPE: This should be added to Boost.Utility. On the other hand, there doesn't appear to be a compelling use case for BOOST_IDENTITY_VALUE.

I will add IDENTITY_TYPE to utility while IDENTITY_VALUE will not be included in Boost.

The following are some suggested *possible* improvements that reviewers brought up. This list is by no means exhaustive. Further, I personally don't think all of these suggestions are necessarily "good", but I think it's fair for Lorenzo (and the community) to consider them nonetheless. Parenthetic comments are my own opinions.

* Some aren't convinced of the utility of LOCAL_BLOCK. (It's use cases appear fairly narrow so it might be best to simplify the library and remove this capability.)

I will remove local blocks (I will document how to trivially implement them with a void local function with no parameters invoked right after it is defined).

* Use "this_" (as opposed to "_this") as an alias for "this" within function bodies, and possibly also within bind declarations. * Present Boost.PP sequence interface as a workaround for the variadic interface? (I don't have a problem with supporting both interfaces at the top level.) * "Local" and "Locale" look too much alike, suggesting a name change to "Scope", "Scoped", "LocalFunction", "Closure" may be a good idea?

Given that local exits and blocks will be removed, I will rename Boost.Local to Boost.LocalFunction.

* Allow use without dependence on Boost.TypeOf. * Rename prefix and postfix macros from XXX_PARAMS/XXX_NAME to XXX/XXX_END? (I don't mind the current macros.) * Explicitly separate bound variables from function parameters. (I think this suggestion has merit but I don't know what the interface could look like.) * Remove support for default parameters to simplify interface and documentation? (It doesn't seem like default function parameters would be very useful.) * Use "capture" instead of "bind" for the bind/capture keyword? (I like and prefer "bind".)

I will keep bind and add a note to the docs.

Finally, here the links to the submitted formal reviews, for reference. Of particular note are Krzysztof's and John's reviews for their comments on the documentation. Some "yes" votes were conditional, but AFAIK Lorenzo has already agreed to address the relevant conditions.

Krzysztof Czainski http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/225543

Vicente J. Botet http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/225604

Andrzej Krzemienski http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/225656

Paul A. Bristow [...cannot find link to review...]

Pierre Morcello http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/225694

Nat Lindon http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.user/71508

Thomas Heller http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/225736

Hartmut Kaiser http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/225745

John Bytheway http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/225746

Alexander Nasanov http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/225783

Edward Diener http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/225795

Gregory Crosswhite http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/225807

Here's a list of all the changes I will make as they were identified during the review: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/contractpp/report/1 #2      Remove local blocks #3      Remove local exits #5      Rename the library Boost Local Function #4      Rename FUNCTION_PARAMS/_NAME to FUNCTION/_END #21     Use this_ also in local function declaration #7      Leave BOOST_IDENITY_TYPE but not _VALUE #8      Move PP_KEYWORD macros to implementation details #10     Move local::function::overload to Boost Functional #16     Make sure that the local function closures work like C++11 lambda closures #6      Expose result_type, argN_type, and arity #9      Use Boost Preprocessor built-in variadic support #12     Present the sequencing syntax as a work-around #14     Allow to specify result type within the LOCAL_FUNCTION macro #15     Try to reduce dependency on Boost Typeof #17     Improve motivation section #24     Document that local function can access protected/private members #11     Create regression tests #20     Fix documentation typos #22     Investigate MSVC errors with /ZI #26     Consider using assert instead of example writing to cout #28     Improve docs on need for Typeof registration #29     Document that a local function cannot be named recursive #1      Change the order of the Tutorial subsections #13     Add example for the GCC_LAMBDA macros #19     Document that bind cannot be use as a parameter type #23     Add the C++11 lambda const-binding workaround to the Alternatives #25     Indicate Phoenix and Lambda version numbers in Alternatives #27     Free arrays in examples without checking !=0 Please let me know if I missed anything. Two personal reflections from this experience: 1) I should have studied Phoenix more before the review started. I would have been better prepared for some of the discussions. 2) A while back, someone on this ML suggested that an library author should participate to 3 reviews before being able to have his/her library reviewed. This comment was in the context of getting more participation to the reviews. I thought the comment made sense (it was "fair") so I participated to 3 reviews before my library was reviewed. I have to say that such experience really helped me during the review of my library. I don't know if it'd make sense to make "participating to 3 reviews" a requirement for a library submission... maybe a requirement that can be waived only by the review wizards.

Finally, really big thanks to everyone for participating in the review and ancillary discussions. I attempted to be as transparent as possible in outlining the rationale for my decision above, but if you have any further questions, do not hesitate to ask.

- Jeff, Review Manager for Local

Thank you very much Jeff for managing the review! --Lorenzo

[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/168612 [2] http://lists.boost.org/boost-announce/2008/05/0190.php