On 6 December 2013 12:17, Niall Douglas
On 6 Dec 2013 at 5:26, Rob Stewart wrote:
Signals2 is an excellent example of just such a thing. We also have cases like Lambda vs. Phoenix.
Boost code is hard to fork mainly because it's particularly hard to write and maintain, but more importantly a direct challenge to the purpose and goals of Boost by a forking group would be seen as a personal attack by most here (including me, by the way).
This sounds like a non-problem to me. I understand why people fork languages or a particular library, but a complete set of libraries? The only fork I can possibly imagine is, say, making a C++11 or C++1y specific version as a baseline. We would
almost certainly unite to see off the challenger, and that's a huge barrier to entry.
Would we? I can't imagine something like that being successful unless the Boost development community was so divided that a significant fraction move over to the forked project while the others stick with Boost, and that community division would be the problem we need to deal with.
This all may seem quite abstract, but there have been more than one Boost competitors over the years which sought to "do Boost better" whether implicitly or explicitly (with some alternatives coming from multinational corporations).
*shrug* Unless you are mentioning actual examples, it is still just abstract and only in your opinion. What exactly is a Boost competitor? Someone else who wants to contribute libraries to the C++ community or the C++ standard? Good for them!
Some have had a reasonable success, but none to my knowledge has ever really come close to displacing Boost.
Seriously? Who out there wants to put Boost out of business? Without specifics, this is just FUD.
In that sense what has worked has worked very well - till now. We can't easily say yet if the present maintainer-led system will scale out.
No one can say what the future holds. More FUD.
I personally think - and I'll put on my hat as a Complex Systems researcher now - that the tipping point where it stops working well is not long far out, especially now modularisation has been implemented which will speed up the complexification of the Boost ecosystem substantially.
What does "not long far out" mean? A year? Ten years? Before C++ collapses under its own weight (another oft-said prediction)? Heat death of the sun? Again, without specifics, this is just FUD and a non-problem. IMHO, of course, -- Nevin ":-)" Liber mailto:nevin@eviloverlord.com (847) 691-1404