[boost] Re: Formal Review: Indexed Set

From: Arkadiy Vertleyb (vertleyb_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-03-28 08:28:59

Hi Joaquin,

Sorry for joining this discussion so late, but here are my comments:

- What is your evaluation of the design?
- What is your evaluation of the implementation?

The code looks clean.  One minor question: the index class template's
equal_range method forwards to lower/upper_bound.  Is it really the best you
can achieve here or is it just a temporary shortcut?

- What is your evaluation of the documentation?

I read the "tutorial" part.  I believe the documentation is excelent -- does
a great job of explaining things, and provides excelent examples to just be
copy-pasted into the code for one to get started.

- What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library?

At least once in my previous experience I had to maintain multiple
synchronized collections.  This project would have greatly benefitted from a
library like the indexed set.

I also think that the "compatible predicate" feature, so unfortunately
missing from the std::set, is very useful.

We are currently using the library to provide a set-based implementation for
our RTL tables.  This is not posted yet, but we hope to post it soon.  We
plan to eventially make the Indexed set-based table implementation default
for our tables.

- Did you try to use the library?  With what compiler?  Did you have any
problems?

Yes, with VC7.1.  I did not have any problems related to the Indexed set.

- How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A quick
reading? In-depth study?

I read the "tutorial" part of the documentation.  Then I wrote Indexed
set-based RTL table implementation, and made it default for RTL tables.
After this I (eventially) successfully compiled and ran RTL tests, which, by
that time all internally utilized the indexed set.

I had to solve a few issues that showed up, but turned out to be our own
issues  (thanks for helping us to discover them).

- Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain?

I use STL collections a lot but never attempted to implement any non-trivial
collection (I don't know if this is qualifies as domain knowledge).

- Do you think the library should be accepted as a Boost library?

Yes, definitely.

Arkadiy