[boost] Re: Yet Another Pointer Policy Proposal... Fast One

From: David B. Held (dheld_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-07-28 19:19:48

"Philippe A. Bouchard" <philippeb_at_[hidden]> wrote in message
news:ai1ouf$ffo$1_at_main.gmane.org...
> [...]
> Too bad.  'Boost' sounded like a performance catalyst.

Well, as the story goes...one of the colleagues of the Boost founders
apparently wrote up the spec to a language called "Booze", which was
supposed to be "better than Java".  When trying to come up with a
name for the library, Booze somehow got morphed into Boost, which
means to imply a boost in productivity, I assume (not having to rewrite
code that is available in pre-written libraries).  I can't think of a single
library in Boost that specifically exists to be a faster version of
something else that is commonly used.  Many libraries are a feature
superset of existing code, perhaps; but their focus tends to be to
provide correct, portable code rather than blazingly fast code (though
unnecessarily slow code is obviously frowned upon).

Dave

P.S.  One could argue that boost::pool exists to provide a faster
allocator than say, malloc.  Or, one could argue that it exists to use
memory more efficiently. ;)