On 3 July 2015 at 15:50, Vladimir Prus <vladimir.prus@gmail.com> wrote:

The formal review of Boost.DLL library by Antony Polukhin is nearing the end of the first week.
As of today, over 100 people read through the library's tutorial, suggesting quite some interest.
However, no reviews were submitted yet. Please take the time to post your thoughts - even if you
don't have time to do a full review, or try the library, comments on design and interfaces are
still very valuable.

I started an experimentation to check a few things related to plugin systems specific to my projects

and want to finish it before giving a final review.

I still can do a pre-review using my experience so far, but wait for my confirmation before counting my review.

Please post your reviews on the mailing list and if possible, answer the
following questions:

- Should the library be accepted?

YES, it should be accepted.

- How useful is it?

- It helps solving a common problem (the code managing plugins in an application).

- It does it without the usual constraints (interface only in C for example) - this part I am actually challenging with my test code.

- It's header only and cross platform.

- It does not do more than helping getting functions and objects from shared libraries (like previous boost.extend did IIRC).

- I tried to use several other such libraries before and so far it's the less intrusive.

- What's your evaluation of
- Design

I consider the solutions provided to solve each usual issue with plugin systems to be simple

and clear, easy to use (as long as you understand what loading plugins imply).

Until I check in some complex cases, I think the design is very good.

The symbol name magic might be tricky to understand sometime but it's an issue which is a side effect of providing

a simple tool to manage symbole names, so it's still good.

One thing I was wondering: would it be possible to provide a way to load shared libraries from

raw memory? Or does the OS APIs all requires that the library have to be on a file sytem?

- Implementation

I didn't look at the implementation yet.

- Documentations

It's good. I pointed a few things but globally it's working for me.

Note:

http://apolukhin.github.io/Boost.DLL/boost/dll/symbol_location.html

I do not understand how to use this function, what is T here?

Also, I did a lot of different plugin systems in the past so I am not sure

what someone unexposed to this kind of system would think of the code.

I suspect that the table in the QuickStart page might scare such people at first,

but in the same time I find it very useful as a summary of how to use the library.

I didn't have any problem with the tutorial so far.

- Tests

I didn't run nor read the tests provided with the library.

- How much effort did you put into your evaluation?

I read all the doc without references pages, a big part of references pages.

The small test project I am trying to setup is a complex "worse case" plugin system matching

my most difficult project (for which plugins are a vital part of the design),

so once I do that I'll have a good idea of

potential issues in non trivial cases.

- Did you attempt to use the library? On what systems and compilers?

Yes as said before I have a small test on-going but it's not finished yet.

My attempt is currently on VS2013 64bit on Windows 7 and 8.1.

I would like to try it with VS2015RC but Boost 1.58 does not compile correctly with this compiler.

I will try it with gcc and clang on linux once my test is finished and working on Windows.

I expect all the platforms to behave the same in my test, so we'll see.