[boost] [soc] Boost.extension/reflection project advances

From: Mariano Gabriel Consoni (mariano.consoni_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-06-06 13:07:36

Hi Community...!

As some of you may know, I'm working on a SoC project called 
"Boost.extensions and reflection".

Boost.extensions is a library that we want to submit for revision to 
Boost. It was started by Jeremy Pack and now I'm working (along with 
Jeremy and my mentor Hartmut Kaiser) on several improvements to prepare 
it for revision. Having this finished, I'll focus on implementing some 
Reflection functionalities (on top of Extensions) into a new library.

I'm writing this email because we think that it's very important for 
this program to keep you posted, as in that way we could benefit from 
your feedback and the community could benefit knowing about what we're 
doing.

I'll send a mail like this periodically (probably once a week or two) to 
let you know the advances.

Let's start with our work since the start of the program (a week ago):

- After the initial phase of reviewing the actual source code I started 
to write some new unit tests. Basically, this new unit tests check the 
functionality of some of the examples (hello_world and 
multiple_inheritance for now).

- I've been analyzing the Info class functionality and I've written two 
new examples, one very basic, like the "hello world" of the info class 
(and it's related to the original extensions hello world indeed) and 
other more complete. Just to let you know, Info class is a class that 
you could attach to the implementations where you can store the 
information that you need. This is very powerful as you can, for 
example, make it a pointer to some base class and then store different 
kinds of information in derived classes (this is shown in the complete 
example).

For the next week we are planning:

- Document the Info class and the new examples.
- Test some border cases.
- Fix some problems with LD_LIBRARY_PATH in certain platforms.
- Make some benchmarks about the overhead of some parts of the library.
- Fix some bugs with the registry class.

If you have any suggestion/comment/feedback we'll be very pleased to 
know them.

--
Mariano