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I'm not ruling out the merit of a Boost.Thread threadpool. For me personally though, the hurdle is very significantly raised: you need to strongly prove to me why your proposed thread pool is much superior to a Boost.ASIO based threadpool. Otherwise I will zero score the GSoC proposal, because in the end we need other proposed projects more.

Superior in what way? Performance-wise, interface-wise? What advanced features would you want from a thread pool to make it superior to the presented implementation?

That's for the applicant to decide. Any proposal needs to be very significantly better than something based on existing features to pass muster not just with Boost, but with Google themselves. There is always an assumption against duplication of existing functionality just for the sake of it. Niall