Re: [boost] Status of property_tree library

From: Thorsten Ottosen (thorsten.ottosen_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-03-13 05:14:55

Marcin Kalicinski skrev:
> I'll try to shed some light on what has happened to property_tree since
> review and why it's been dragging.
> 

> The allocations problem remains. I have been unable to come up with a scheme
> that would reduce the number of allocations without compromising simplicty
> of the library. The key point is that I want to maintain validity of
> iterators in presence of insertions/erases. This rules out array based
> containers. The best I can think of is a custom list implementation. That
> has potential to reduce number of allocations by roughly 30%, which is not
> enough IMO.

For now, it doesn't really matter IMO. People often find it useful 
anyway, and move-semantics will probably help a lot when it arrives.

I can't remember why it is important to remain iterator validity, but 
cnosider if it is absolutely necessary. Perhaps validity of references 
to elements is enough.

> On top of that I'm not sure whether the heavy type-parametrization of the
> library (i.e. lots of template parameters everywhere) is a good thing. It
> definitely makes it harder to document, use and understand. In all the the
> feedback I got there is no evidence of anyone actually using these template
> parameters. So IMO these should be reduced to just the character type.
> Otherwise the library pretends to be a generic tree container, which it
> wasn't supposed to be.

Well, it's been a long time since the review, but I think that ew should
respect the decisions made after the review.

-Thorsten