On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 07:04:36PM +0100, Jonathan Wakely wrote:
On 14 June 2013 18:53, Lars Viklund wrote:
On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 04:21:38PM +0000, Niall Douglas wrote:
The existing code base being prepared for entry into Boost is pure C++11, or at least as much C++11 as is provided by the Nov 2012 CTP experimental MSVC compiler and therefore easily supported by GCC 4.6 and clang 3.x.
I hope that you do realize that the Nov12 CTP does not come with a go-live license, nor is recommended for any human consumption.
It seems quite odd to me to spend significant GSoC resources on making a library that targets only two compilers,
You make it sound like C++11 is going to disappear or be a temporary fad. Other compilers will catch up at some point.
and assumedly a rather narrow set of OSes.
Is there any compiler that targets more OSes than GCC?
Even if GCC can target an OS, it's not always as suitable as the native compiler on the OS, with the native runtime. There are also several alternative C++03 compilers that serve special purposes. Should projects needing their other features (excellent auto-vectorisation, etc.) have to completely drop Boost due to an urge to constantly target the bleeding edge.
In fact are there any OSes supported by Boost that GCC *doesn't* target?
That depends on what you consider supported by Boost. A lot of the courtesy support for the native compilers for many OSes out there seems to be dying out.
Was this C++11-only requirement part of the original project plan, and why didn't anyone object to it then?
Expecting authors of new libraries to refrain from using features of the current C++ standard seems a bit ridiculous to me. Not everyone will be able to use C++11-only libraries, but why should those users hold everyone else back?
I used to see Boost as an empowering library, enhancing and evening out the playing field among the compilers out there. Some seem to see it as a playground to gain recognition and fast-track things into the coming standard libraries, instead of producing something usable in the real world. I guess it's losing the goal and aim I perceived, if it ever had it to begin with. To me, it feels like a betrayal from the library I have spent many manhours supporting. I've been on this rant before on the lists, in the big sprawling discussions about the feasibility of a Boost 2.0, but it seems nothing was learned then, and I don't expect anything to be learned going forward either. As for limiting Boost authors, for leaf libraries that end users can avoid, sure, there might not be too much harm. It's creeping into the very core libraries as well, which _does_ bother me, as it can render whole swaths of the library utterly unusable. In the end, we need a definitive statement from whatever cabal is controlling Boost, so we don't get these kinds of discussion resurrections every few months. All this causes is a lack of faith in the project. -- Lars Viklund | zao@acc.umu.se