February 2019 - Boost - lists.stage.boost.cppalliance.org

CMake Announcement from Boost Steering Committee
by Jon Kalb 13 Aug '24

13 Aug '24

The libraries produced by the Boost community have had a greater impact on the way that the C++ community writes code than any other library implementation. The focus of the Boost community will always be on the libraries, but it is undeniable that we are dependent on and often limited by the infrastructure of our trade. Years ago, the move to Git was contentious; yet, it was required to improve development. In a similar vein our build system has become an impediment for many developers and users, existing and prospective. Therefore, we, the Steering Committee, announce to the Boost community our desire and intent to move Boost’s build system to CMake for users and developers alike. We are soliciting comments and proposals from the community to guide the process and the goals. Our desire is that the community can come to consensus by the end of the calendar year with a vision of supporting users and developers. We understand that the actual process of achieving the end goal will be long, time consuming, and not without its share of conflict. We also recognize that the Boost community is comprised of bright and passionate individuals that are eager to get involved and help get work done. The members of the Steering Committee have been encouraged by the discussions and activity surrounding CMake on the mailing lists over the years and know that many people have voiced visions. We hope that each of you rejoins the discussion to support this initiative and contributes to the common goal of improving Boost’s integration into the broader C++ ecosystem. For the Boost Steering Committee, Jon Kalb, Chair jonkalb(a)boost.org

49 199

[asio][coroutine] forbid_suspend blocks
by Vinícius dos Santos Oliveira 07 Aug '19

07 Aug '19

I've implemented a dumb linter using Python + clang API that allows you to mark certain blocks as “atomic in respect to coroutines” using C++11 attributes. Usage example follows: void f() { int yield; g(yield); [[bt::forbid_suspend]] { // Comment this call to make linter accept the code g(yield); t(); } } You can change bt::forbid_suspend to another identifier by tuning settings on the beginning of the script. The prefix forbid was inspired by Rust's linters[1] as you cannot disallow the linter from inside the forbid_suspend block. Some limitations follow: - A suspend point is identified by looking references to any id equals to yield in the last argument passed to function calls. It means that yield[ignored_ec] and alike will be correctly identified, but it needs to be named yield and it needs to be the last argument to the function call. - I haven't found a way to extract attributes related to COMPOUND_STMT nodes with clang API, so I manually look for token gaps and do a simple regex. It means you cannot use macros to [[bt::forbid_suspend]] as the macro won't be expanded. - You better call the script with '-x c++' and also ' -I/usr/lib/clang/5.0.1/include'. Like I've said in the beginning of the email, it's a *dumb* linter, which means it doesn't try to handle all cases. Therefore, I don't hope to do many changes to it or maintain it to work against newer releases of clang and I'm only uploading it to gist (not fullblow Github): < https://gist.github.com/vinipsmaker2/d930fbe5b7597432b021effe618da171>. It should also be easy to hack as it is very small. I'm releasing the linter under public domain. Enjoy. I have been using fibers in a daily basis on the last months of my job to solve networking problems on a gateway project. Some of the technologies I use are: - Boost.Asio and its spawn function. - A few custom synchronization primitives for the fibers (e.g. mutex, semaphore). - Eventually I'll have to write a custom spawn function that returns a joinable handle so I can kill the usage of a fiber::barrier in a few places. I've been using the linter for about a week already and looks fine. My use case are: - To prevent iterator invalidation in regions accessing shared variables. - To guarantee events order in algorithms that handle races (cannot yield while task YYY hasn't finished). The project I use it in is not an open source project, so I cannot talk much more about it. Also, I don't claim my solution is original. I wouldn't be surprised if the very same solution exists in the wild (please let me know if you know of a similar approach). This is not a new problem. It is know for some time. For instance, in P0171, Gor Nishanov noted this same problem: “In coroutines the suspend point is clearly marked with await, which tells the reader that something unusual happens in this function and allows the reader, for example, to confirm whether the lifetimes of the objects of interest align with the lifetime of the coroutine or not, whether some locks need to be acquired to protect some concurrently accessed data, and whether some locks need to be released before the execution reaches the suspend point.” — <http://open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2015/p0171r0.html>, 2015 However, the solution he presented was to manually examine whole blocks of code without help from the compiler. I argue that the solution he presented is as error-prone as manually looking for exit paths that don't free acquired resources in languages lacking RAII. And I've been spoiled too much by RAII. Furthermore, I take this comment of his with highly suspicious look: “Since we are on the subject of maintenance nightmares, we would like to offer a conjecture that the absence of the await in P0114 is a likely source of many maintenance nightmares. Without a syntactic marker to signal to the person reading the code that something funny is going on, it is impossible to tell whether the following code is correct or not” — http://open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2015/p0171r0.html If I had to give a vote to the proposal he was defending or Chris' proposal, I'd probably have chosen Chris'. [1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/attributes.html# lint-check-attributes -- Vinícius dos Santos Oliveira https://vinipsmaker.github.io/

2 3

Non-ASCII Path Names in Repo
by Tom Kent 25 May '19

25 May '19

In the last few days we've had a non-ASCII path name added to the repo: tools/boostdep/test/utf8-test-ßµ™∃ Which came with commit 8893d1c57951a [1] I noticed this because a python 2 script (calling shutil.copytree) I had running on windows that copied the repo around started to fail. I've long needed to update that script to python 3, and am working on this. However, I wanted to point this out to the list so we could discuss if there are any other ramifications of having a non-ascii path. I vaguely remember some discussion about something like this in the past, but couldn't find it via search. If this is already a settled topic, that's great. Tom [1] https://github.com/boostorg/boostdep/commit/8893d1c57951a4a83705ed203005576…

2 1

Re: [boost] [ Interest? ] [ out_ptr ] Tiny C++ Abstraction for C-Style Output Pointers
by Bjorn Reese 12 May '19

12 May '19

On 06/28/18 21:03, ThePhD via Boost wrote: > out_ptr is a small abstraction for making types such as > std::unique_ptr, std::shared_ptr, boost::shared_ptr, and the upcoming > std::retain_ptr > <http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2016/p0468r0.html> work > work C-Style output functions as a parameter, addressing the need of > wanting to be able to do "my_c_api_init( foo, bar, &my_smart_ptr );". It's Does out_ptr have other use-cases than C interoperability?

7 14

[thread] compiler error gcc 7.3 on cygwin
by James E. King III 06 May '19

06 May '19

Getting an internal compiler error with gcc 7.3 but only on cygwin 64-bit. Jim@pulsar /cygdrive/c/boost/libs/thread $ ../../b2 --abbreviate-paths toolset=gcc cxxstd=11 define=_POSIX_C_SOURCE=200112L define=__USE_ISOC99 threadapi=pthread address-model=64 variant=release -q ... gcc.compile.c++ ../../bin.v2/libs/thread/test/test_10963_c.test/gcc-7.3.0/rls/cxstd-11-iso/thrd-mlt/vsblt-hdn/test_10963_c.o In file included from ../../boost/thread/detail/invoker.hpp:30:0, from ../../boost/thread/future.hpp:31, from ../../libs/thread/test/test_10963.cpp:13: ../../boost/thread/detail/invoke.hpp: In function ‘decltype (*(forward<A0>)(boost::detail::invoke::a0).*boost::detail::invoke::f) boost::detail::invoke(Fp&&, A0&&) [with Fp = void (boost::executors::basic_thread_pool::*)(); A0 = boost::executors::basic_thread_pool*]’: ../../boost/thread/detail/invoke.hpp:102:43: internal compiler error: in gimplify_expr, at gimplify.c:12006 return (*boost::forward<A0>(a0)).*f; ^ Please submit a full bug report, with preprocessed source if appropriate. See <https://gcc.gnu.org/bugs/> for instructions. "g++" -std=c++11 -fvisibility-inlines-hidden -m64 -mthreads -O3 -finline-functions -Wno-inline -Wall -pedantic -fvisibility=hidden -Wextra -Wno-long-long -Wno-unused-parameter -Wunused-function -pedantic -DBOOST_ALL_NO_LIB=1 -DBOOST_THREAD_THROW_IF_PRECONDITION_NOT_SATISFIED -DNDEBUG -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=200112L -D__USE_ISOC99 -I"../.." -c -o "../../bin.v2/libs/thread/test/test_10963_c.test/gcc-7.3.0/rls/cxstd-11-iso/thrd-mlt/vsblt-hdn/test_10963_c.o" "../../libs/thread/test/test_10963.cpp" ...failed gcc.compile.c++ ../../bin.v2/libs/thread/test/test_10963_c.test/gcc-7.3.0/rls/cxstd-11-iso/thrd-mlt/vsblt-hdn/test_10963_c.o... If I change the C++ language level to 03 the problem goes away. I also cannot reproduce it on linux with the same version of compiler (but it probably isn't the exact same compiler code). Should I go ahead and file that gcc bug? - Jim

2 1

Building Boost 1.69 with Visual Studio 1.69
by Trueman, Chris 26 Mar '19

26 Mar '19

Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself given the recent topic about picking a version number for the latest MSVC toolset but I'm having trouble building boost 1.69 with Visual Studio 2019 preview. I blindly assumed the toolset was 14.20 (given the directory where cl.exe is found). Letting b2 determine the version yields vc141 in the lib names. Trying to force 142 with: using msvc : 14.2 : <path to cl.exe> ; in project-config.jam yields errors about unescaped characters. Suggestions welcomed. Chris. INTELLICORP LEGAL NOTICE: This E-Mail message and all attachments transmitted with it are intended solely for the use of the addressee and may contain legally privileged and confidential information. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or an employee or agent responsible for delivering this message to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, copying or other use of this message or its attachments is strictly prohibited. If you received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately by replying to this message, and then delete it.

6 11

[test] unit test command-line handling
by Stefan Seefeld 22 Mar '19

22 Mar '19

Hello, this is a question concerning the Boost.Test framework. I'd like to pass command-line arguments to my tests, and I'm unsure of how to proceed. I have found https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_68_0/libs/test/doc/html/boost_test/adv_sce…, which shows how to access the command-line programmatically, but that's declared obsolete, and it's also lacking some important info, such as how I should handle the argv vector. Are there any examples that demonstrate this use case ? Specifically: * What (non-deprecated) API can I use to access command-line arguments during test initialization ? * How does my own handling of command-line arguments interact with Boost.Test's own command-line argument handling ? Thanks, Stefan -- ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...

3 8

[release] 1.70.0 closed for major changes
by Marshall Clow 07 Mar '19

07 Mar '19

The master branch is now closed for new libraries and breaking changes, and will be closing for the beta in one week. Also, if you're ready, you can also add your libraries' changes to the release notes at: < https://github.com/boostorg/website/blob/master/feed/history/boost_1_69_0.q… > After editing the release notes, you should get a form to create a pull request, remember to submit it, otherwise I won't see your change. As always, the calendar for the release cycle is available at: https://www.boost.org/development/ Thanks, -- The Boost Release Team

7 9

[variant2] Need rationale for never-empty guarantee
by Andrzej Krzemienski 04 Mar '19

04 Mar '19

Hi Peter, Thank you for writing and sharing this implementation of variant. I am sorry if I am bringing back an issue that has been already discussed and solved before, but I do not understand the rationale behind doing compromises in order to provide the never-empty guarantee. The short rationale provided in Boost.Variant library: https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_69_0/doc/html/variant/design.html#variant.… was provided before we got C++11 the moved-from state in the language. Today, it should come as no surprise to programmers that a type might be in a "moved from" state where only a limited interface of an object can be used. The guarantee provided by variant's assignment is not a strong exception safety guarantee: it is possible that my variant has value A, I want to assign value B, and (due to an exception) I end up with value C. If this happens, the only thing I can reasonably do is to either abandon whatever I was doing or reset the variant to the state that I need. So the guarantee that it is not left empty does not seem to be of much use. But the cost to be paid is noticeable. I think that this question should be addressed in the documentation. Regards, Andrzej

13 51

GSoC 2019
by Shourya IIT B 04 Mar '19

04 Mar '19

Respected Sir, I am Parashuram Shourya from India. Currently, I am doing my Master’s in Geoinformatics from Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering(CSRE), Indian Institute of Technology Bombay(IITB). I have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering. Currently, I am learning Machine Learning and High-Performance Computing. I have vast programming experience in C, C++, Python I would love to contribute to The Qt Project in the upcoming Google Summer of Code 2019. I would be very grateful to get any directions to start with so that I can pursue and participate in GSoC 2019 with your organization.

2 1