Re: Re: [boost] Re: Next revision of boost::thread

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-01-09 14:35:20

At 11:44 AM 1/9/2003, William E. Kempf wrote:

 >As for conditional compilation... the Boost.Filesystem stuff has no
 >need for this, while Boost.Threads has a very definate need.

The reason that Boost.Filesystem doesn't have conditional compilation is 
that a design decision was made to limit the library to features which 
could be implemented in both POSIX and Windows.

Otherwise it would have been shot full of optional/conditional features.

I'm not saying Boost.Threads should take exactly the same approach, but I'd 
rather not see a lot of optional/conditional features to support operating 
systems other than those two O/S families.

What I found doing research for the Filesystem library was that most of the 
remaining legacy systems have been retrofitted to support POSIX, while new 
O/S designs tend to support POSIX right from the start.

What is left are features that are so system specific that those wishing to 
take advantage of the features should just use the operating system's 
native API.  The programs aren't going to be portable in any case, so why 
provide an illusion of portability where there is none?

--Beman