On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 7:35 AM Jeff Garland via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:
The committee seems to be concerned more with internal and external politics than with serving the community. If that wasn't true there would be ZERO library additions that haven't been battle hardened by being deployed and established themselves as the defacto standard already.
Unlike the boost review where there's 'a decider', the committee uses consensus. It's a much higher bar, as frankly, it should be.
A "much higher bar" can prevent a good library from being accepted or prevent a bad library from being rejected. That is, consensus cuts both ways.
As for battle hardened, sometimes it's not quite so simple as sometimes language changes are needed or vendor support is needed. Every proposal gets vetted for usage experience and it's clear that without experience it's unlikely to go forward. Is the process perfect -- no. Will it make everyone, even the members happy -- no. Can it be improved -- surely -- but like many things in life it's not as simple as we'd like.
We can talk about the case when language changes are needed but let's focus on libraries.
The only thing they should be doing is rubber-stamping libraries that are already the standard for doing something.
And if we 'just did that', things like generic programming wouldn't exist in c++. If the 'Roque Wave' container design was adopted in 1998 the world would be very different now.
There was no GitHub in 1998. Today it feels like some authors treat the standard library as a vehicle for making their library available everywhere in hopes it'll get adopted. All I'm saying is that adoption should come before standardization. Git pull requests are better than Subversion commits.
And if you want one of those 'battle hardened' libraries adopted, that's fine
You see, I think it is problematic to "want" to standardize a library. IMO the standardization process should be dull and boring, rather than driven by exciting innovation.