On 19 Feb 2015 at 11:59, Bruno Dutra wrote:
Take hana for example. It is an undeniably impressive piece of work for what's been designed, but that, in fact, is constexpr computations, which happen to depend on and thus provide type computations mechanisms. Hence it suffers of the two shortcomings I mentioned.
The list may not be aware that Boost is funding a GSoC extension for Hana, which is currently about half way through. It is currently expected that Hana will reapply for an additional GSoC this summer as well. Quality software takes time. Remember Louis has a full coursework load. Regarding compiler compatibility, Hana almost certainly should work on GCC 5.0 and Louis nearly has it working on GCC 4.9. I'd imagine the compiler which will take the longest is as usual MSVC, but there is a reasonable chance that a VS2017 might just provide enough for Hana, albeit with many workarounds for the lack of two phase lookup. The "hackish" syntax you mention is partially unavoidable with C++, and partially because constexpr was very poorly thought through as a language feature in that it is much too hard to get constexpr to be exact. This is regrettable, but the ship has sailed now, just as we currently overload template syntax with functional compile time programming which is definitely hackish. If we were sensible, we would deprecate that in favour of something like D's compile time programming syntax, but progress on introducing D style syntax has been oddly partial (functions mostly). Niall --- Boost C++ Libraries Google Summer of Code 2015 admin https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/SoC2015