July 2012 - Boost-announce - lists.stage.boost.cppalliance.org

Announce: Boost 1.50 installer for 32-bit Windows now available
by John Wiegley 31 Jul '12

31 Jul '12

With apologies to the community for not finding the time to release Windows installers for 1.48 and 1.49, we now have an installer for 1.50 available for immediate download: http://www.boostpro.com/download The version installs 32-bit libraries and/or DLLs for the following compilers: Visual C++ 8.0 (Visual Studio 2005) Visual C++ 9.0 (Visual Studio 2008) Visual C++ 10.0 (Visual Studio 2010) We are dropping support for Visual C++ 7.1 as of this time, unless someone wishes to contract us to bring it back. Also, although I have prepared a 64-bit installer, I have not yet found a solution for integrating it with the existing installer. If anyone with NSIS scripting experience would be willing to assist me, we'd be happy to provide a free installer which installs both 32-bit and 64-bit Boost libraries for applicable Windows platforms. Enjoy! -- John Wiegley BoostPro Computing Software Development Training http://www.boostpro.com Clang/LLVM/EDG Compilers C++ Boost

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[boost] [type_erasure] Review started (July 18-27, 2012)
by Lorenzo Caminiti 18 Jul '12

18 Jul '12

Hello all, *** The review of Steven Watanabe's proposed Boost.TypeErasure library begins on July 18, 2012 and ends on July 27, 2012. *** THE LIBRARY C++ provides runtime polymorphism through virtual functions. They are a very useful feature, but they do have some limitations. * They are intrusive. In generic programming, we can design an interface which allows third-party types to be adapted to it. * They require dynamic memory management. Of course, most of the problems can be avoided by using an appropriate smart pointer type. Even so, it still acts like a pointer rather than a value. * Virtual functions' ability to apply multiple independent concepts to a single object is limited. The Boost.TypeErasure library solves these problems allowing us to mirror static generic programming at runtime. Library source: http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/type_erasure/ Pre-built documentation: http://steven_watanabe.users.sourceforge.net/type_erasure/libs/type_erasure/ You can also download archives with pre-built documentation from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/steven-watanabe.u/files/ YOUR REVIEW Please submit a review to the mailing-list by replying to this email ("[boost] [type_erasure] Review ..." should be in the subject). Please state clearly whether you think this library should be accepted as a Boost library. Other questions you may want to consider: 1. What is your evaluation of the design? 2. What is your evaluation of the implementation? 3. What is your evaluation of the documentation? 4. What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library? 5. Did you try to use the library? With what compiler? Did you have any problems? 6. How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A quick reading? In-depth study? 7. Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain? Thanks in advance to all who participate in the review discussion -- I'm looking forward to it! The review manager. --Lorenzo _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost

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[boost] conversion review report
by Gordon Woodhull 16 Jul '12

16 Jul '12

Hi Vicente, all, Profuse apologies for the long delay in writing this report. Cheers, Gordon Report on Boost Conversion Library Review, August 20-29, 2011. I want to thank Vicente Botet Escriba for submitting the Conversion library for review and for his general good nature in receiving criticism and alternate designs. The Conversion library presents a general framework for plugging in conversion operations between arbitrary types, providing a consistent interface for type-to-type conversions. The library is unfortunately rejected. During the review, there were two votes for acceptance and two against, and some interesting conversation from about a dozen participants. The major reason the library can't be accepted in its current form is that there was near consensus that there is no universal conversion domain, especially when the source or destination type might be a string. Much of the review focused on possible One Definition Rule (ODR) violations, which are a consequence of having a universal customization point using template specializations or function overloads. Many solutions were offered, which will make up the second part of this report, "How to Avoid Universality." I. Concerns about the library Conversions Are Not Generic? While some reviewers didn't see the need for a generic conversion library (and I was a little surprised at the vehemence of their opinions), I don't see this in itself as a reason to reject the library. The library's stated purpose is to provide a common interface for general type <-> type conversions, like lexical_cast does for string <-> type conversions. However, it was interesting that seemingly no one could come up with applications of truly generic conversion, although Jeffrey Lee Hellrung and Antony Polukhin alluded to their existence. Also, some reviewers pointed out that you often need to choose what kind of conversion to do, and a generic library can get in the way here. Strings are the most obvious example: if you are converting from a string representing a binary value it would not work to use a decimal converter. Antony Polukhin pointed out a more subtle example: "lexical_cast<char>(1) and numeric_cast<char>(1) will produce different output." Jeff Hellrung summed this point up nicely: "I think it's certainly possible for different clients using the same generic component to want different conversion implementations for a given pair of types, and that point, Boost.Conversion's universally-defined conversion implementations become useless. One wants the conversion operation to be parametrized as well as the types involved in the conversion." Multi-Client Specialization Concerns Leaving aside possible ODR violations, which we'll return to in Part II, some reviewers questioned the scalability of using template specialization and overloads when many clients (i.e. independent headers) may be customizing the behavior. Vladimir Batov claimed that a system which allows partial specializations on both Source and Target can't be made to work generally. Jeroen Habraken said SFINAE/enable_if "does make code fragile". I'm not clear if these conversations were resolved (or resolvable ;). Non-Generic Solutions Some reviewers objected that conversions should just be defined within individual libraries, but of course this begs the question (as came up recently on the ML between DateTime and Chrono), "which library should house the conversions?" Others (such as Phil Endecott) thought that simple c-style functions such as rgb_to_cmyk() were more explicit and direct. Why is this so complex? Kevlin Henney, initially excited about a general solution to the problem which lexical_cast first set out, commented on the documentation: "Based on casual reading, it feels a little more complex and requires a higher-entry level of knowledge than would be appropriate for many of the people who actually need this functionality." II. How to Avoid Universality One of the positive results of this review was a small catalog of alternatives to a universal customization point involving template specialization or overloaded functions. a. Avoid the Problem In the strictest sense, any library which allows either kind of universal customization can be prone to ODR violations. But many reviewers particularly thought that a customization point involving two UDTs was especially dangerous. To his credit, Vicente was very up-front about the limitations of his design, and attempted to formulate rules for how the library could be used safely. In the documentation, he suggests (IIUC) that header-only libraries could use generic conversions as long as they don't define them, or define them as long as they don't use them. http://tinyurl.com/cmbgyfk b. Inherited tags John Bytheway suggested a tag-dispatch system where conversions are tagged with their source library, and any library which depends on conversions from two libraries would define a tag which inherits from the tags of both libraries. Thus ODR violations are avoided at the expense of having to specify an extra tag (effectively a sort of global conversion domain). http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2011/08/184836.php c. Conversion Domains and Overloaded Function Objects Going on the consensus that there is no universal conversion domain, your humble review manager suggested a metaprogramming solution that defines conversion domain objects which combine a set of conversions within an object. http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2011/08/185259.php A more general solution would be to create an overloaded polymorphic function object, much like a polymorphic-source version of Lorenzo Caminiti's OverloadedFunction library (http://tinyurl.com/72nolyj) However, I have been warned (by Daveed Vandevoorde) that the rules for function overloading are too dangerously complicated to implement in a metaprogram. d. Boost.Dispatch Matthias Gaunard announced that he is working on a library particularly to "solve the problem of specializing a function template for a category of types with best-match selection." http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2011/08/185286.php e. Abuse of Unnamed Namespaces Emil Dotchevski suggested that "It might be possible to abuse unnamed namespaces to avoid violating ODR". I'm not clear if this was a serious suggestion as it wasn't spelled out. :) f. GIL's solution (?) Christian Henning wrote: "GIL has such functionality. I like their way of structuring conversion." However, I was not able to find a description of this mechanism for the report. Thanks to everyone who participated in the review! _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost

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Review Wizard Status Report for July 2012
by Ronald Garcia 13 Jul '12

13 Jul '12

============================================== Review Wizard Status Report for July 2012 ============================================== News ==== 1. Multiprecision Arithmetic Reviewed 2. Boost 1.50.0 Released. New Libraries: 1) Algorithm 2) Functional/OverloadedFunction 3) LocalFunction 4) Utility/IdentityType Open Issues =========== The following libraries have been reviewed and await reports from their review managers: * Conversion - reviewed August 2011; review manager: Gordon Woodhull. * Predef - reviewed February 2012; review manager: Joel Falcou. * Multiprecision - reviewed June 2012; review manager: Jeffrey Hellrung The following libraries have been accepted to Boost, but have not yet been submitted to SVN: * Constrained Value - accepted September 2010; author: Robert Kawulak. * GIL.IO - accepted January 2011; author: Christian Henning. The following libraries have been accepted and submitted to SVN, but have not yet appeared in a release: * Atomic - accepted July 2011; author Helge Bahmann. * Type Traits Introspection - accepted August 2011; author: Edward Diener. * Lockfree - accepted August 2011; author: Tim Blechmann. * Context - accepted January 2012; author: Oliver Kowalke. The following libraries have been accepted provisionally to Boost, but have not been submitted for mini-review and full acceptance: * Endian - accepted provisionally November 2011; author: Beman Dawes. * Log - accepted provisionally March 2010; author: Andrey Semashev. General Announcements ===================== As always, we need experienced review managers. Please take a look at the list of libraries in need of managers and check out their descriptions. In general review managers are active boost participants, including library contributors, infrastructure contributors, and other mailing list participants with a substantial track record of constructive participation. If you can serve as review manager for any of them, email Ron Garcia or John Phillips, "rxg at cs dot cmu dot edu" and "phillips at pacific dot mps dot ohio-state dot edu" respectively. We are also suffering from a lack of reviewers. While we all understand time pressures and the need to complete paying work, the strength of Boost is based on the detailed and informed reviews submitted by you. If you are interested in reviewing a library but won't have time during the review period, you can always prepare your review ahead of time. No rule says you can only work on a review during the review period. A link to this report will be posted to www.boost.org. If you would like us to make any modifications or additions to this report before we do that, please email Ron or John. The review schedule is an unordered list of the libraries awaiting review. As such, any library on the schedule can be reviewed once the developer is ready, a review manager has been secured, and the manager, developer, and wizards agree on a date to schedule the review. Review Schedule =============== * Join (M) * Pimpl (M) * Sorting (M) * Quaternions, Vectors, Matrices (M) * Variadic Macro Data (M) * Block Pointer (M) * Singularity (M) * Extended Complex Numbers (M) * Metaparse (M) * Polygon: Voronoi Extensions * Coroutine * Type Erasure * Range Extensions * Contract * Nowide (M) * ODEint (M) ``(M)`` marks libraries that need review managers. -------------------- Join ---- :Author: Yigong Liu :Review Manager: Needed :Download: http://channel.sourceforge.net/ :Description: Join is an asynchronous, message based C++ concurrency library based on join calculus. It is applicable both to multi-threaded applications and to the orchestration of asynchronous, event-based applications. It follows Comega's design and implementation and builds with Boost facilities. It provides a high level concurrency API with asynchronous methods, synchronous methods, and chords which are "join-patterns" defining the synchronization, asynchrony, and concurrency. Pimpl ----- :Author: Vladimir Batov :Review Manager: Needed :Download: https://github.com/boost-vault/Miscellaneous/blob/master/Pimpl.zip :Description: The Pimpl idiom is a simple yet robust technique to minimize coupling via the separation of interface and implementation and then implementation hiding. This library provides a convenient yet flexible and generic deployment technique for the Pimpl idiom. It's seemingly complete and broadly applicable, yet minimal, simple and pleasant to use. Sorting ------- :Author: Steven Ross :Review Manager: Needed :Download: https://github.com/boost-vault/Sorting :Description: A grouping of 3 templated hybrid radix/comparison-based sorting algorithms that provide superior worst-case and average-case performance to std::sort: integer_sort, which sorts fixed-size data types that support a rightshift (default of >>) and a comparison (default of <) operator. float_sort, which sorts standard floating-point numbers by safely casting them to integers. string_sort, which sorts variable-length data types, and is optimized for 8-bit character strings. All 3 algorithms have O(n(k/s + s)) runtime where k is the number of bits in the data type and s is a constant, and limited memory overhead (in the kB for realistic inputs). In testing, integer_sort varies from 35% faster to 2X as fast as std::sort, depending on processor, compiler optimizations, and data distribution. float_sort is roughly 70% faster than std::sort. string_sort is roughly 2X as fast as std::sort. Quaternions, Vectors, Matrices ------------------------------ :Author: Emil Dotchevski :Review Manager: Needed :Download: http://www.revergestudios.com/boost-qvm/ :Description: QVM defines a set of generic functions and operator overloads for working with quaternions, vectors and matrices of static size. The library also defines vector and matrix data types, however it allows users to introduce their own types by specializing the q_traits, v_traits and m_traits templates. Variadic Macro Data ------------------- :Author: Edward Diener :Review Manager: Needed :Download: `Boost Sandbox <http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/variadic_macro_data/>`__ :Description: This library adds support and functionality for variadic macros to Boost as well as integrating variadic macros with the Boost PP library without changing the latter library in any way. Block Pointer ------------- :Author: Phil Bouchard :Review Manager: Needed :Download: https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/block_ptr/ :Description: Deterministic memory manager of constant complexity capable of handling cyclic collections. Singularity ----------- :Author: Ben Robinson :Review Manager: Needed :Download: https://github.com/cppmaven/Singularity :Description: The Singularity Design Pattern allows you to restrict any class to a single instance. Unlike the infamous Singleton, Singularity gives you direct control over the lifetime of the object, does not require you to grant global access to the object, nor does it limit you to the default constructor for that object. Extended Complex Numbers ------------------------ :Author: Matthieu Schaller :Review Manager: Needed :Download: http://code.google.com/p/cpp-imaginary-numbers/ :Description: The library is an extension of the std::complex class addressing two issues: 1. The standard does not guaranty the behaviour of the complex class if instantiated with types other than float/double/long double. 2. Some calculation where pure imaginary numbers (i.e. multiples of sqrt(-1)) appear are unnecessarily slowed down due to the lack of support for these numbers. The code I submit contains two interleaved classes boost::complex and boost::imaginary which can be instantiated with any type T provided T overloads the usual arithmetic operators and some basic (real) mathematical functions depending on which complex function will be used. It is thus an extended version of Thorsten Ottosen's n1869 proposal (http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers/2005/n1869.html) Metaparse --------- :Author: Abel Sinkovics :Review Manager: Needed :Download: http://abel.web.elte.hu/metaparse/metaparse.zip :Description: Metaparse is a library for constructing parsers parsing at compile-time based on template metaprogramming. The parsers built with the library take boost::mpl::strings as input and can produce - types - objects (types with public static members) - callable C++ functions (types with public static method) - template metafunction classes as output (based on the input being parsed). On compilers supporting constexpr the library provides the following syntactic sugar for writing the input of the parsers: BOOST_STRING("this is a string") The library can be used for implementing DSLs in C++, including DSLs making C++ template metaprogramming easier (see examples). Polygon: Voronoi Extensions --------------------------- :Author: Andril Sydorchuk :Review Manager: Lucanus Simonson :Download: http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/gtl/ :Description: This library extends Boost.Polygon with the following features: - Robust and efficient implementation of the sweepline algorithm that allows to construct Voronoi diagram, Delaunay triangulation and medial axis of a set of points and line segments. - Coordinates of the output geometries are computed within the 64 machine epsilon relative error (6 mantissa bits). - Voronoi diagram data structure that allows efficient traversal and data association with the output Voronoi graph. - No 3rd party dependencies (e.g. GMP, MPFR), all the required multiple precision types are implemented as part of the library. - The input and output coordinate type domains are configurable via coordinate type traits, thus allowing to compute coordinates of the Voronoi vertices within any required precision. - The full construction of the Voronoi diagram of 100 000 points takes only 0.27 seconds (see benchmarks). Coroutine --------- :Author: Oliver Kowalke :Review Manager: Hartmut Kaiser :Download: http://gitorious.org/boost-dev/boost-dev/archive-tarball/coroutine :Description: This library is an implementation of coroutines and generators using Boost.Context. Type Erasure ------------ :Author: Steven Watanabe :Review Manager: Lorenzo Caminiti :Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/steven-watanabe.u/files/ :Description: The TypeErasure library is a generalization of boost::any and boost::function. It allows easy composition of arbitrary type erased operators. Range Extensions ---------------- :Author: Akira Takahashi :Review Manager: Neil Groves :Download: https://github.com/faithandbrave/OvenToBoost :Description: This project adds some features of the Oven Range Library to Boost.Range. Features: - Additional Range Adaptors (taken, taken_while, dropped, dropped_while, elements, elements_key, memoized, outdirected) - Extensions for using Lambda (regular function, regular operator) - Infinite Range (iteration function) - and additional range utilities. Contract -------- :Author: Lorenzo Caminiti :Review Manager: Dave Abrahams :Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/contractpp/files/latest/download :Description: This library implements Contract Programming for the C++ programming language (see the end of this email). In addition, the library implements virtual specifiers (final, override, and new, see C++11), concept checking, and named parameters. This library is implemented for the C++03 standard and it does not require C++11. Nowide ------ :Author: Artyom Beilis :Review Manager: Needed :Download: http://cppcms.com/files/nowide/ :Description: This library makes cross platform Unicode aware programming easier. It provides an implementation of standard C and C++ library functions, such that their inputs are UTF-8 aware on Windows without requiring to use Wide API. ODEint ------ :Author: Karsten Ahnert and Mario Mulansky :Review Manager: Needed :Download: https://github.com/headmyshoulder/odeint-v2 :Description: odeint provides routines for numerically solving Ordinary Differential Equations, a task heavily required when approaching scientific problems numerically. In odeint we have implemented the most common algorithms in a modern, generic way which provides several advantages over existing implementations. The main focus of odeint is to separate algorithms from the underlying basic computation unit. This allows for example to easily use the power of modern GPUs via CUDA or OpenCL to speed up computational heavy simulations. Libraries under development =========================== See http://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/LibrariesUnderConstruction for a current listing of libraries under development.

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