Trip Report - How others see us

From: Beman Dawes (beman_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-01-05 14:18:05

In mid-December Dave Abrahams and I spent the better part of a day 
discussing Boost related topics with Matt Austern, Andy Koenig, Bjarne 
Stroustrup, and John Wilkinson.  It's always interesting to hear how Boost 
is viewed, and these are people active on both the C++ Standards Committee 
and in the C++ community as a whole.

What follows is my view of Matt, Andy, Bjarne, and John's views, so is 
bound to contain some inaccuracies.  Hopefully I've got the major thrusts 
right.  Here goes:

*  They are very supportive of what Boost is doing.  They see free C++ 
libraries (and a web-site hosting those libraries) as very important, even 
crucial, to the future of C++.

*  Peer-review and wide participation are seen as key factors 
distinguishing Boost from other efforts.

*  Boost can be viewed as a sort of community or club, where the members 
work well together.  There is concern over how this can scale up as the 
Boost effort expands both in size and scope.  There is concern that other 
efforts have degenerated into destructive warring factions and flame wars 
as they grew beyond a certain size. [Dave and I explained that the culture 
of Boost has so far been successful at discouraging self-destruction.] 
There was discussion of Boost as evolving into a hierarchy (or DAG) of 
communities, along domain lines.

*  Domain libraries are of great interest, both in the sense of a view that 
there is a user need for the libraries themselves, and the possibility that 
sub-groups working on domain libraries may be a good way for Boost to 
sustain future growth.

*  C++ libraries are viewed as a spectrum, ranging from base libraries like 
the traditional C++ Standard Library, on out to fairly obscure domain 
libraries.  Partially portable libraries were explicitly included in the 
spectrum, with the example given of a threads library portable to Unix and 
Windows but not to other platforms. The view was expressed that Boost 
should consider libraries anywhere in the spectrum, and that the C++ 
Standards Committee might also consider a broad portion of the spectrum for 
possible standardization (perhaps via non-normative Technical Report.)

*  There was discussion of libraries with overlapping or duplicate 
functionality.  The specific scenario mentioned was library A providing 90% 
of the functionality of library B, yet doing so with an interface and 
implementation only one-third the size.  Both were viewed as having a 
place.

*  Several types of dependencies are viewed as barriers to wide acceptance 
of Boost:  Intra-library dependencies requiring all (or too much) of Boost 
just to use a small portion, and tool-chain dependencies such as requiring 
some Python, Perl, or GNU package, for building or using the libraries.

Thanks to Matt for putting the meeting together, and to Bjarne for acting 
as host.

Comments?

--Beman