Re: [boost] [GSoC] Request for Feedback on Boost.Bloom Filter Project

Subject: Re: [boost] [GSoC] Request for Feedback on Boost.Bloom Filter Project
From: Arash Partow (arash_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-06-25 03:34:04

Alejandro Cabrera wrote:
> I'm writing to request feedback, suggestions, and advice from the Boost community. I've been working on a Bloom filter data structure for about a month and a half now. At this point, the following is complete and available in the Boost Sandbox:
> - working, basic prototype (insert & query operations, union & intersect)
> - a test suite covering the public interface
> - five examples
> - documentation covering many aspects of the project (tested on Chrome 12 and 13, Firefox 4 and 6)
>

Looks ok, but one important question - Why is the BF typed? Its not necessary and in fact there are many use-cases where one might want to insert and/or test membership for a range of different types using the same BF - all that those types require are that they be hashable.

Another issue, along the lines of what Phil mentioned wrt naming of the "contains" method. It should really be called "contains" for two reasons, firstly its a transitive verb - "a doing" label which is indicative of how it would be used in code, and secondly you've provided the method false_positive_rate which coupled with the fact that a BF is a probabilistic set, indicates to the user that any result will inherently have a false positive probability assigned with it, which is naively proportional to a function of the bits in the BF and the number of elements inserted into the BF (and not necessarily the element's bit-length).

All in all a good start - keep up the good work!