Aleksander Demko wrote:

I, like billions of other developers, have a medium sized project that for various reasons, invented its own thread, io, etc libraries. I'm thinkin of switching over to boost stuff for all my utility needs, but I'm wondering if boost has/possibly will have/is open to the possibility of adding/ or will never have the following facilities:

serialization/object persistance (via iostreams)

I am not sure if the Boost.Serialization library supports this, you'd need to ask Robert Ramey. I have a library in the sandbox (outfmt) that supports I/O of the standard containers and several boost constructs (e.g. contained_pair) for sequential types. I am currently in the process of overhauling the documentation and tests ready for the upcoming review.

network socket iostreams

Check out Jonathan Turkanis's IOStreams library (pending review). As far as I am aware, this makes it easier to write custom I/O streams. You will probably need to implement the socket code for it, but there might be a Boost library that does that.

interface to dlls/.so loading

I am not sure about these. I think the thread library provides something like this to perform thread cleanup, but you'd need to ask one of the Boost.Thread people.

url parsing (something like the filesystem lib)

It should be possible to use Boost.Spirit to write a URL grammar. URL handling would be a good extension to the filesystem library, although I am not sure if/how it is possible.

and, just out of curiosity: xml/html parsing

It is possible to use Boost.Spirit for this. If you check out the Spirit repository (http://spirit.sourceforge.net/repository/applications/show_contents.php) you will find several examples. Also, if you want a SAX-based parser, contact me off-list and I'll e-mail the parser I have been working on. NOTE: my parser does not check tag/element name validity, but does perform basic structural clean-up. Regards, Reece _________________________________________________________________ It's fast, it's easy and it's free. Get MSN Messenger today! http://www.msn.co.uk/messenger