============================================== Review Wizard Status Report for November 2008 ============================================== News ==== May 7 - Scope Exit Library Accepted - Awaiting SVN May 17 - Egg Library Rejected August 14 - Boost 1.36 Released New Libraries: Accumulators, Exception, Units, Unordered Containers August 27 - Finite State Machines Rejected September 10 - Data Flow Signals Rejected September 30 - Phoenix Accepted Conditionally November 3 - Boost 1.37 Released New Library: Proto November 10 - Thread-Safe Signals Accepted - Awaiting SVN November 25 - Globally Unique Identifier Library mini-Review in progress Older Issues ============ The Quantitative Units library, accepted in April 2007 is in SVN (listed as units). The Time Series Library, accepted in August 2007, has not yet been submitted to SVN. The Switch Library, accepted provisionally in January 2008, has not yet been submitted for mini-review and full acceptance. Property Map (Fast-Track) and Graph (Fast-Track) have been removed from the review queue. The author (Andrew Sutton) intends to submit a new version of this work at a later time. A few libraries have been reviewed and accepted into boost, but have not yet appeared in SVN as far as I can tell. Could some light be shed on the status of the following libraries? Apologies if I have simply overlooked any of them: * Flyweight (Joaquin Ma Lopez Munoz) * Floating Point Utilities (Johan Rade) * Factory (Tobias Schwinger) * Forward (Tobias Schwinger) * Scope Exit (Alexander Nasonov) * Time Series (Eric Niebler) * Property Tree (Marcin Kalicinski) -- No documentation in SVN Any information on the whereabouts of these libraries would be greatly appreciated. For libraries that are still waiting to get into SVN, please get them ready and into the repository. The developers did some great work making the libraries, so don't miss the chance to share that work with others. Also notice that the review process page has been updated with a section on rights and responsibilities of library submitters. General Announcements ===================== As always, we need experienced review managers. The review queue has been growing substantially but we have had few volunteers, so manage reviews if possible and if not please make sure to watch the review schedule and participate. 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 or library contributors. If you can serve as review manager for any of them, email Ron Garcia or John Phillips, "garcia at osl dot iu dot edu" and "phillips at 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. A recent effort is trying to secure at least five people who promise to submit reviews as a precondition to starting the review period. Consider volunteering for this and even taking the time to create the review as early as possible. 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. If you're a library author and plan on submitting a library for review in the next 3-6 months, send Ron or John a short description of your library and we'll add it to the Libraries Under Construction below. We know that there are many libraries that are near completion, but we have hard time keeping track all of them. Please keep us informed about your progress. Review Queue ============ * Lexer * Boost.Range (Update) * Shifted Pointer * Logging * Futures - Williams * Futures - Gaskill * Join * Pimpl * Constrained Value * Thread Pool * Polynomial -------------------- Lexer ----- :Author: Ben Hanson :Review Manager: Eric Neibler :Download: `Boost Sandbox Vault <http://boost-consulting.com/vault/ index.php? action=downloadfile&filename=boost.lexer.zip&directory=Strings%20-% 20Text%20Processing&>`__ :Description: A programmable lexical analyser generator inspired by 'flex'. Like flex, it is programmed by the use of regular expressions and outputs a state machine as a number of DFAs utilising equivalence classes for compression. Boost.Range (Update) -------------------- :Author: Neil Groves :Review Manager: Needed :Download: `Boost Sandbox Vault <http://www.boost-consulting.com/ vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=range_ex.zip&directory=>`__ :Description: A significant update of the range library, including range adapters. Shifted Pointer --------------- :Author: Phil Bouchard :Review Manager: Needed :Download: `Boost Sandbox Vault <http://www.boost-consulting.com/ vault/index.php?&direction=0&order=&directory=Memory>`__ :Description: Smart pointers are in general optimized for a specific resource (memory usage, CPU cycles, user friendliness, ...) depending on what the user need to make the most of. The purpose of this smart pointer is mainly to allocate the reference counter (or owner) and the object itself at the same time so that dynamic memory management is simplified thus accelerated and cheaper on the memory map. Logging ------- :Author: John Torjo :Review Manager: Gennadiy Rozental :Download: http://torjo.com/log2/ :Description: Used properly, logging is a very powerful tool. Besides aiding debugging/testing, it can also show you how your application is used. The Boost Logging Library allows just for that, supporting a lot of scenarios, ranging from very simple (dumping all to one destination), to very complex (multiple logs, some enabled/some not, levels, etc). It features a very simple and flexible interface, efficient filtering of messages, thread-safety, formatters and destinations, easy manipulation of logs, finding the best logger/filter classes based on your application's needs, you can define your own macros and much more! Futures ------- :Author: Braddock Gaskill :Review Manager: Tom Brinkman :Download: http://braddock.com/~braddock/future/ :Description: Joint review of the Futures libraries scheduled for 1/5/09-1/20/09. The goal of the boost.future library is to provide a definitive future implementation with the best features of the numerous implementations, proposals, and academic papers floating around, in the hopes to avoid multiple incompatible future implementations in libraries of related concepts (coroutines, active objects, asio, etc). This library hopes to explore the combined implementation of the best future concepts. Futures ------- :Author: Anthony Williams :Review Manager: Tom Brinkman :Download: http://www.justsoftwaresolutions.co.uk/files/ n2561_future.hpp (code) http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2008/ n2561.html (description) :Description: Joint review of the Futures libraries scheduled for 1/5/09-1/20/09. This paper proposes a kind of return buffer that takes a value (or an exception) in one (sub-)thread and provides the value in another (controlling) thread. This buffer provides essentially two interfaces: * an interface to assign a value as class promise and * an interface to wait for, query and retrieve the value (or exception) from the buffer as classes unique_future and shared_future. While a unique_future provides move semantics where the value (or exception) can be retrieved only once, the shared_future provides copy semantics where the value can be retrieved arbitrarily often. A typical procedure for working with promises and futures looks like: * control thread creates a promise, * control thread gets associated future from promise, * control thread starts sub-thread, * sub-thread calls actual function and assigns the return value to the promise, * control thread waits for future to become ready, * control thread retrieves value from future. Also proposed is a packaged_task that wraps one callable object and provides another one that can be started in its own thread and assigns the return value (or exception) to a return buffer that can be accessed through one of the future classes. With a packaged_task a typical procedure looks like: * control thread creates a packaged_task with a callable object, * control thread gets associated future from packaged_task, * control thread starts sub-thread, which invokes the packaged_task, * packaged_task calls the callable function and assigns the return value, * control thread waits for future to become ready, * control thread retrieves value from future. Notice that we are in the unusual position of having two very different libraries with the same goal in the queue at the same time. The Review Wizards would appreciate a discussion of the best way to hold these two reviews to produce the best possible addition to Boost. 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: `Boost Sandbox Vault <http://www.boost-consulting.com/ vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=Pimpl.zip&directory=&>`__ http://www.ddj.com/cpp/205918714 (documentation) :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. Constrained Value ----------------- :Author: Robert Kawulak :Review Manager: Jeff Garland :Download: http://rk.go.pl/f/constrained_value.zip :Description: Review scheduled for 12/1/08-12/10/08 The Boost Constrained Value library contains class templates useful for creating constrained objects. A simple example is an object representing an hour of a day, for which only integers from the range [0, 23] are valid values: :: bounded_int::type hour; hour = 20; // OK hour = 26; // exception! Behavior in case of assignment of an invalid value can be customized. For instance, instead of throwing an exception as in the example above, the value may be adjusted to meet the constraint: :: wrapping_int::type buffer_index; buffer_index = 257; // OK: wraps the value to fit in the range assert( buffer_index == 1 ); The library doesn't focus only on bounded objects as in the examples above -- virtually any constraint can be imposed by using a predicate: :: // constraint (a predicate) struct is_odd { bool operator () (int i) const { return (i % 2) != 0; } }; :: // and the usage is as simple as: constrained odd_int = 1; odd_int += 2; // OK ++odd_int; // exception! The library has a policy-based design to allow for flexibility in defining constraints and behavior in case of assignment of invalid values. Policies may be configured at compile-time for maximum efficiency or may be changeable at runtime if such dynamic functionality is needed. Thread Pool ----------- :Author: Oliver Kowalke :Review Manager: Needed :Download: `Boost Sandbox Vault <http://www.boostpro.com/vault/ index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=boost-threadpool. 2.tar.gz&directory=Concurrent%20Programming>`__ :Description: The library provides: - thread creation policies: determines the managemnt of worker threads - fixed set of threads in pool - create workerthreads on demand (depending on context) - let worker threads ime out after certain idle time - channel policies: manages access to queued tasks - bounded channel with high and low watermark for queuing tasks - unbounded channel with unlimited numer of queued tasks - rendezvous syncron hand-over between producer and consumer threads - queueing policy: determines how tasks will be removed from channel - FIFO - LIFO - priority queue (attribute assigned to task) - smart insertions and extractions (for instance remove oldest task with certain attribute by newst one) - tasks can be chained and lazy submit of taks is also supported (thanks to Braddocks future library). - returns a task object from the submit function. The task it self can be interrupted if its is cooperative (means it has some interruption points in its code -> ``this_thread::interruption_point()`` ). Polynomial ---------- :Author: Pawel Kieliszczyk :Review Manager: Needed :Download: `Boost Sandbox Vault <http://www.boostpro.com/vault/ index.php? action=downloadfile&filename=polynomial.zip&directory=>`__ :Description: The library was written to enable fast and faithful polynomial manupulation. It provides: - main arithmetic operators (+, -, * using FFT, /, %), - gcd, - different methods of evaluation (Horner Scheme, Compensated Horner Algorithm, by preconditioning), - derivatives and integrals, - interpolation, - conversions between various polynomial forms (special functions for creating Chebyshev, Hermite, Laguerre and Legendre form). Libraries under development =========================== Please let us know of any libraries you are currently developing that you intend to submit for review.