[boost] asio review results -- asio accepted

From: Jeff Garland (jeff_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-03-22 10:31:50

All -

I'm pleased to announce that asio has been accepted into Boost.  As 
usual with a Boost review, the asio review generated plenty of 
discussion, issues, and controversy.  Comments ranged from high praise, 
including success stories of projects in production, to serious design 
concerns and issues.  On balance, in my judgment, asio provides a 
generally solid library that is ready for inclusion into the Boost
library -- providing key functionality in an area that developers have a 
strong need.

Of course, like anything else, asio is not perfect -- a number of key 
issues were uncovered during the review.  In terms of required changes 
I'm only going to cite a few:

- Fixes to dynamic memory allocation issues
- Interface changes to support ipv4 and ipv6 seamlessly at runtime
- Improvements to support strongly typed socket interfaces

Chris has communicated a couple possible solutions to the memory 
allocation issue and I'll ask that the interface and other changes for 
this issue continue to be discussed on the Boost list so consensus can 
be achieved on the best resolution.

Other key improvements that should be explored as future enhancements 
include:

- Possible removal of some of the c-style interfaces
- Exploration of higher level iostream integrations
- Performance improvements
- Improved documentation (wouldn't be Boost w/o this one)

Chris has a much longer list of changes garnered from the review and is 
well on his way to addressing many of them.

Note that there were several threads and discussions about performance, 
which is particularly critical for the domain covered by asio. One of 
the performance issues is the dynamic memory allocation issue cited 
above.  In general, the reviewers have extremely high expectations here. 
However, after reviewing the discussion and library it's my belief that 
many developers will find asio performance sufficient to build 
significant projects with only the memory allocation changes. I expect 
Chris will be able to address some of the other performance issues cited 
by reviewers in asio over time.

Once again I'll apologize to the Boost community for the delay in the 
review results.  The delay was entirely due to my own personal 
scheduling issues and should not reflect on asio in any way. Thanks 
again to all the reviewers for their effort and especially to Chris for 
his tremendous effort in bringing asio to Boost!

Jeff