April 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

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[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/

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Mother of all Variants
by Robert Ramey 05 Jul '19

05 Jul '19

I'm way out of my depth in the variant discussion. Seems to me it revolves around all the trade offs regarding design choices. Could we perhaps decide not to decide. Suppose we create a type which looks like: template< bool BasicGuaranteeSupported, bool StrongGuaranteeSupported, bool EmptyStateProhibited, bool AssignmentSupported, bool MoveSupported, class T ... > struct mother_of_variants{ // some trivial mp11 code }; Now we could define: using boost_variant = mother_of_all variants< bool true, //BasicGuaranteeSupported, bool true, //StrongGuaranteeSupported, bool true, //EmptyStateProhibited, bool true, //AssignmentSupported, bool true, //MoveSupported, >; std_variant, std_optional, std_expect, boost_outcome, etc. would be similarly defined. And some "extras" like no_except_variant, trivial_variant, etc. would be added. and of course my favorite candidate: using safe_variant = mother_of_all variants< bool true, //BasicGuaranteeSupported, bool true, //StrongGuaranteeSupported, bool true, //EmptyStateProhibited, bool false, //AssignmentSupported, bool false //MoveSupported, >; In addition, we'd have some type traits: mother_of_all_variants::no_runtime_allocation<mov>; mother_of_all_variants::no_double_instancen<mov>; mother_of_all_variants::is_mother_of_all_variants<mov>; etc. Just think that of all the time we've spent on discussions about optional, expected, std::variant, boost::variant, etc. At this rate, these discussions will keep hounding us forever. Of course I realize that the main purpose of having these variants of variants is to justify the discussions - but perhaps we might be ready for a new topic. Robert Ramey

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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…

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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?

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b2 --layout=versioned compiler tag in library filename
by Paul Harris 06 May '19

06 May '19

Hi guys, In the past, b2 would build libraries named like so: libboost_atomic-gcc48-mt-d-1_60.so (note -gcc48-) I tried compiling Boost 1.66.0 (from boost-git) with gcc 8.3.0, but the library it generates is named: libboost_atomic-gcc-mt-d-x64-1_66.so (note the -gcc-) No compiler version number in the tag... I (and CMake) was expecting it to be named: libboost_atomic-gcc83-mt-d-x64-1_66.so (note the -gcc83-) To build, I did: ./bootstrap.sh --with-libraries="atomic" ./b2 --layout=versioned I then downloaded the 1.70.0 tarball and compiled that, and this time the result was: tar xfv boost_1_70_0.tar.bz2 cd boost_1_70_0/ ./bootstrap.sh --with-libraries="atomic" ./b2 --layout=versioned ls -l stage/lib libboost_atomic-gcc8-mt-d-x64-1_70.so I don't see any documentation around the compiler version tag, what is the current policy? thanks, Paul

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[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

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[variant] Heads-up!
by Antony Polukhin 02 May '19

02 May '19

Hi, I've merged a very cool optimization by Nikita Kniazev into the master branch. From now on boost::variant does pointer stealing for recursive variants. This significantly improves the performance of the variants move constructors. However if you use a variant variable after the std::move for anything except destruction and assignment then you're getting an UB. Beware! -- Best regards, Antony Polukhin

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Re: [boost] [variant] tests failing on master
by Nikita Kniazev 30 Apr '19

30 Apr '19

> boost.variant tests are failing on master. Whatever the bug is, it is also causing my signals2 tests that use variant to fail. Config needs develop to master merge to resolve the issue.

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[variant] tests failing on master
by Frank Mori Hess 30 Apr '19

30 Apr '19

boost.variant tests are failing on master. Whatever the bug is, it is also causing my signals2 tests that use variant to fail. -- Frank

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