Re: [boost] [review] Review of Flyweight library started January 21 and stillrunning!

From: Edd Dawson (lists_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-01-28 14:28:16

Joaquín Mª López Muñoz wrote:
> I'd like to add that none of the submitted reviews report any actual usage
> of the lib, except maybe running the tests. It would be great if we can
> get some feedback about the behavior of the library in some real world
> scenario, as this kind of info is crucial to determining whether the material
> has real applicability beyond the toy examples provided.

I have a situation where I'd like to experiment with this library, but I do not 
have time to start it yet. Perhaps my mentioning it is half-way valuable, 
though, so here goes :)

When I saw the announcement, I immediately thought about using the library to 
store and access Unicode text. Specifically, I am imagining that it might allow 
me to create a string type that acts as a randomly accessible sequence of 
glyphs. Each glyph would be a flyweight<>.

Most glyphs can of course be represented directly by a 32 bit integer, as 
they're only composed of a single code-point. However, uncommon glyphs that 
would need more than one code-point (because of combining marks) may benefit 
from a flyweight approach.

Is this a good use case? Would std::basic_string<flyweight<glyph> > "work" (with 
appropriate character traits)? Could I also get boost's regular expressions to 
operate on these strings?

Kind regards,

Edd