Re: Technical Excellence?

From: John Maddock (jz.maddock_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-03-27 16:48:08

> When I look at a proposed library I try to figure out what is great about
> it, how well it performs for its users (or even, does it have any users?),
> what part of the API is exceptionally well designed and ergonomic, but most
> importantly I want to ask: what makes this library stand out to the extent
> that it should be part of the library collection? What aspects of the
> library, if viewed by someone learning C++ or interested in improving their
> design skills, are inspirational?
>
> Is this overly demanding or exclusionary? Am I overthinking things? Should
> we be asking more of these types of questions and requiring better answers?
>
> What is the criteria for determining if a library is good enough to become
> part of the collection?

We muddle through and try and keep the quality up.

I wonder how much this is to do with maturity: when Boost began the std 
library had little to offer outside of the STL, github didn't exist, and 
there was just no coherent ecosystem for C++ libraries, or much quality 
either.  Boost pushed us all to try and think and do better, and no 
doubt that has had a knock on effect on quality elsewhere too.

Strangely the bar has actually been raised in many ways: when we began 
we were dealing with really quite small libraries which didn't need vast 
amounts of work to produce.  So now that the low hanging fruit has been 
picked off both here and in the std, we're left with the hard problems 
which require a lot more effort to complete.  A lot more effort to 
review too.  We always got lots of reviews for the one-page libraries, 
and not so many for the big ones!

Perhaps one thing we should encourage again, is more experimentation at 
the bleeding edge - what can we do only with the very latest std 
features that's better, simpler and more performant than before?

Curiously yours, John.