[boost] Why use Boost?

From: Paul Giaccone (paulg_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-02-02 04:44:12

There is a thread on the Boost-users mailing list at the moment asking 
what users needed to know when they got started with Boost.

One of the points raised is that, while pretty much all users of Boost 
think it is great, they didn't know when they started using it why it 
was so great and why it would be to their advantage to use it.  One of 
the reasons for this is that the front page of the website does not 
really sell the product.

I agreed with this point.  Here's a summary of my posting:

"What the site needs, in my view, on the front page is some sort of 
material selling Boost. Why was Boost set up in the first place?  
Because, in some areas, C++ is deficient, is difficult to use or expects 
too much of the programmer. Boost helps by providing what is useful but 
missing and takes a lot of the work out of C++ programming.

"Essentially, Boost needs to sell itself as something that no C++ 
programmer would want to be without. Think how the adman would write it: 
"C++ getting you down? Spending hours tracking down that memory leak? 
Then try Boost! It will change your life!" Well, maybe not, but 
something along these lines would certainly go a long way to showing why 
anyone should be using Boost. At the moment, the front page tells me is 
that the libraries are free, portable, peer-reviewed and work well with 
the C++ standard library, but that doesn't tell me why it is to anyone's 
advantage to use them."

David Abrahams of Boost Consulting, who started the thread, suggested 
that I write a paragraph for a selection of Boost libraries that did 
just this.

Below is what I came up with, from my experience as a Boost user who has 
used the libraries mentioned.  I think it would be helpful to both users 
and developers if this text or something similar could be included on 
the front page of boost.org or some other prominent place on the 
website.  For myself, if I had seen something like this content on the 
front page, I would have rushed to download the libraries.  What do you, 
as the developers, think of this proposal?

Keep up the excellent work.

Paul Giaccone

"Memory allocation on the heap in C++ requires the programmer to manage 
the memory, make sure that there is always at least one pointer to the 
memory and deallocating it at the right time.  It is easy to forget to 
do this or to do it in the wrong place in the code, which causes memory 
leaks, or, worse, program crashes.  Boost makes life easier for the 
programmer by providing various 'smart pointers' that automatically 
maintain memory allocated on the heap, deallocating it at the right time 
and requiring minimal intervention from the user."

"A programmer wanting to read and write structured data (such as the 
member variables of a class) to file can run into a number of problems.  
How should the data be formatted when written to file?  Do the read and 
write functions correspond exactly?  If the structure of the data 
changes in future releases of the program, will it still possible to 
read files that were written using the old format?  Are files written on 
one platform readable on another?  How should pointers be handled?  
Boost provides a serialization library that manages all of these 
problems and more simply and elegantly."

"In standard C++, handling multiple command-line arguments usually 
requires the user to write a bespoke parser to read in and interpret 
these arguments and handle syntax errors, missing arguments, duplicated 
flags and the like.  Boost's program_options library handles 
command-line arguments without fuss."

"Writing user-defined input and output streams can be tricky.  The Boost 
iostreams library gives the user easy access a range of useful 
functionality, including data encryption, compression in various 
standard formats, line-ending conversion and output in XML format."

"C++ allows for casting between similar types, such as int and double. 
The Boost conversion library extends what is possible with casting, 
enabling the user to cast integers to strings and vice versa, and to 
cast safely between polymorphic types."