Re: [boost] [scope] Scope review starts on November 26th

On Sun, Nov 26, 2023 at 7:14 AM Andrey Semashev via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:

On 11/26/23 06:27, Vinnie Falco wrote:

...

On Sat, Nov 25, 2023 at 6:17 PM Andrey Semashev via Boost wrote:

...

...

The fact that the standard doesn't provide that functionality (provided that it is needed by users) is a deficiency of the standard, not the Boost library.

Users vastly prefer even the "defective" std components over the theoretically-better boost components, simply by virtue of them being in the standard, with all of the benefits this brings. Education, documentation, ubiquity, and so on, for std components is orders of magnitude more robust than the boost equivalent. This more than makes up for any perceived deficiencies. Like it or not, vocabulary types and algorithms which make it into std are going to have an enormous advantage over any third party code.

I'd like to think everyone is free to make their own choice based on their own criteria and merits of each of the options. Availability of the standard library is an important advantage, but it is not ultimate. Personally, I find the standard library severely lacking, meaning I cannot reasonably write a serious project relying solely on the standard library and nothing else. I'd have to write a lot of code that I know exists and tested in other libraries like Boost, and I'd have to be mad not to try and reuse it. So you could say Boost is my natural extension of the standard library, something that I always have by my hand, just as easily reachable as the standard library.

BTW, on the topic of innovation and stagnation, my other complaint about the standard library (or rather its implementations, every one of them) is that once a feature is implemented, it gets frozen because of ABI stability. Stable ABI is important, but because of it bugs like this[1] never get fixed.

[1]: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=98978

I don't disagree with your overall point (see my comment on opt-in), but it's simply untrue that things are *frozen* -- implying no changes are possible due to ABI constraints. Newer versions of optional support additional facilities (monadic interface) and I suspect you'll see support for references in 26. Yep, ABI updates prevent some changes, but not every change. Jeff