mobile/embedded boost

From: John Maddock (John_Maddock_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-08-29 06:29:31

Folks,

Up until now, I have had the impression that boost wasn't interested in
supporting platforms/compilers with no exception handling support, however
I've had a couple of queries from regex users about building on WinCE
(where I am led to understand that the compiler has no exception support).

I wonder what do boost folks feel about these platforms - on the one hand
one could argue that exception handling is far more useful on these mobile
platforms than on desktop ones (which almost never run out of resources),
and that therefore it's a compiler problem.  On the other hand these are
popular platforms, and some of boost is very appropriate here (static
asserts, type traits based optimizations, smart_ptr etc).  I'm not
suggesting that the graph lib would be appropriate for say a toaster, or
that regex might be used in a washing machine :-)  but many mobile
platforms now have multi-megabyte memories and could support even the
larger boost libs.

The main problem of course, is what does one do if the lib would normally
throw an exception, but exceptions aren't available?  In some cases an
assert might be appropriate, but that's not universally true.

I don't have any answers here - or enough experience in this area to begin
to develop an informed opinion - but I hope that some of you guys will.

- John Maddock
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/john_maddock/