Re: [boost] Boost, not LEWG

On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 4:12 PM Vinnie Falco wrote:

On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 3:46 PM Jeff Garland via Boost wrote:

...

Ideally what Zach proposes will ship under the Boost banner first. Why? So more than the maybe 20 people on the committee will look at it before the ink is dried and it ships with compilers.

It sounds like the committee's workflow is defective. If more people

It has defects like any other process -- there is no perfect approach. And plenty of committee members agree (as you can see many on this list are involved). In general, the committee responds only to people that bring proposals -- that can be members of the committee or anyone in the community. If you write a paper and propose something the committee will respond. should interact with the library before it goes into the standard,

here's a novel idea:

Don't put it in the standard yet.

That's correct, I really wish it were this easy. So one of the 1st questions a library will face is: is there an implementation? And the obligatory github repo is provided (do we go download and compile it - who has the time?). Next typical question: Given the priorities of the committee for the next release, do we want to spend time on this proposal? I'm sure a few proposals fail this bar, but probably not nearly enough. Part of the issue there being that c++ is forever behind in basic standard library facilities compared to other languages - we still have technical debt. Of course that isn't it -- if your library proposal is small you have to make it through a design study group, Library Evolution, and finally LWG. It would be typically a ~2 year process. You'd think that would afford plenty of time for committee members to look at the details, but the world is full of distractions. If it's bigger....well read on...

Why does Boost.Text have to go into the standard right away?

It doesn't, and I'd be personally surprised if it makes 23 (sorry Zach).

Why can't it enjoy life as its own non-std library for a few years, the way that Asio did?

Many apologies to Chris K. on that from me (fun fact I was asio review manager). Without checking, I think over a decade of his life has expired working toward getting asio into the standard. All of us owe Chris a huge debt of gratitude for the endless hours he's spent.

Plenty of users and companies can enjoy the Unicode library without it having to be in the std:: namespace.

While true, it's still very much surprising how many cannot. Being in std:: really is the ultimate c++ distro. Jeff