The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to comp.lang.c++.moderated,comp.std.c++,comp.lang.c++ as well. on Thu Apr 09 2009, woodbrian77-AT-gmail.com wrote:

Would you agree that recoding that takes advantage of C++ 1998 should be higher priority than C++0x?

In general, maybe. For BoostCon, no.

For example, Boost Serialization doesn't use hinted inserts with (mulit)set or (multi)map.

Have you submitted a ticket for that at http://svn.boost.org?

I believe Boost Multi Index does. In the performance section here -- http://webEbenezer.net/comparison.html -- there's a subsection on Load/Receive tests that mentions this. I also mentioned this subject twice in this thread: http://lists.boost.org/boost-users/2009/03/45712.php

If anyone cared or even noticed wasn't clear as there was no response to that particular point.

Different library maintainers take different approaches to responding to reports on the Boost list. Specific Trac tickets (especially with patches attached, as you seem to be able to provide) are a little harder to leave dangling because to make them go away you have to explicitly close them, so I suggest you try that approach with one ticket per issue.

For some reason I doubt the author or anyone else bothered to improve the library in this way and the 1.39 version of the Serialization library will have the same weak performance in this area.

Additionally and more importantly, now the C++ Middleware Writer has support for several boost::intrusive containers. Neither Boost Intrusive nor Boost Serialization have serialization support for any of the intrusive containers. The Boost Instrusive containers are superior to the standard containers in a number of ways, so this gap is big.

While working to update parts of Boost to be able to take advantage of C++ 2010 (or 20110), makes sense to me, I think the items I mentioned should be higher priority than the C++0x work.

A Boost bugfixing sprint sounds like a great idea, but that can happen in cyberspace (the way Ubuntu does it). I invite you to come to the Boost developers' list and kick one off. I would certainly be grateful for an excuse to focus on closing Boost Trac tickets. In fact, it sounds like a good thing to mull over at BoostCon At BoostCon I want to take advantage of the face-to-face time to do things that are a bit more educational, less critical-path, and that can really benefit from having a bunch of people in the same room. I think exploring how C++0x features interact in real C++ libraries is one of those.

It's not as cool or sexy though.

That's an issue, too. To make it worthwhile for people to travel across the country to BoostCon, you need to put "cool" things on the program ;-).

The first item should be relatively easy to address, which makes it all the more surprising that as the releases go by it doesn't get addressed.

Remember that addressing any given issue in a Boost library is basically up to one person: whoever is maintaining that library. Maintainers are volunteers, and each one arranges his priorities differently. But in the case of something posted on the -users mailing list whose thread sorta trailed off, I wouldn't be surprised if the issue has fallen off the maintainer's radar. I suggest getting it into the tracking system.

The second item, though is a different story. Anyway, even if you are only able to address the first item by the time BoostCon is over, I'll be impressed.

Well, it's not really up to me, and I don't /think/ Robert Ramey is planning to come to BoostCon this year.

And since I'm able to point out two weaknesses like this with one library, there may be other problem areas in other libraries.

Definitely: https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/report/1 Looks like we have 766 open issues right now :-(

This could be incorporated into the pricing of the conference: $499 gets you into the C++98 "fixer" and $599 gets you into the C++0x "fixer." :)

Yeah, not very practical. Those sessions are just two 3-hour segments out of a whole week of material. We're not making the conference itself into one big sprint. Take a look at the program: http://www.boostcon.com/program Cheers, -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com