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Subject: [boost] Review Wizard Report for November 2008
From: Ronald Garcia (garcia_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-11-25 16:44:25


==============================================
Review Wizard Status Report for November 2008
==============================================

News
====

May 7 - Scope Exit Library Accepted - Awaiting SVN

May 17 - Egg Library Rejected

August 14 - Boost 1.36 Released
    New Libraries: Accumulators, Exception, Units, Unordered Containers

August 27 - Finite State Machines Rejected

September 10 - Data Flow Signals Rejected

September 30 - Phoenix Accepted Conditionally

November 3 - Boost 1.37 Released
    New Library: Proto

November 10 - Thread-Safe Signals Accepted - Awaiting SVN

November 25 - Globally Unique Identifier Library mini-Review in progress

Older Issues
============

The Quantitative Units library, accepted in April 2007 is in SVN
(listed as units).

The Time Series Library, accepted in August 2007, has not yet been
submitted
to SVN.

The Switch Library, accepted provisionally in January 2008,
has not yet been submitted for mini-review and full acceptance.

Property Map (Fast-Track) and Graph (Fast-Track) have been removed
from the review queue. The author (Andrew Sutton) intends to submit a
new version of this work at a later time.

A few libraries have been reviewed and accepted into boost, but have
not yet appeared in SVN as far as I can tell. Could some light be
shed on the status of the following libraries? Apologies if I have
simply overlooked any of them:

* Flyweight (Joaquin Ma Lopez Munoz)
* Floating Point Utilities (Johan Rade)
* Factory (Tobias Schwinger)
* Forward (Tobias Schwinger)
* Scope Exit (Alexander Nasonov)
* Time Series (Eric Niebler)
* Property Tree (Marcin Kalicinski) -- No documentation in SVN

Any information on the whereabouts of these libraries would be greatly
appreciated.

For libraries that are still waiting to get into SVN, please get them
ready and into the repository. The developers did some great work
making the libraries, so don't miss the chance to share that work with
others. Also notice that the review process page has been updated with
a section on rights and responsibilities of library submitters.

General Announcements
=====================

As always, we need experienced review managers. The review queue has
been growing substantially but we have had few volunteers, so manage
reviews if possible and if not please make sure to watch the review
schedule and participate. Please take a look at the list of libraries
in need of managers and check out their descriptions. In general
review managers are active boost participants or library
contributors. If you can serve as review manager for any of them,
email Ron Garcia or John Phillips, "garcia at osl dot iu dot edu"
and "phillips at mps dot ohio-state dot edu" respectively.

We are also suffering from a lack of reviewers. While we all
understand time pressures and the need to complete paying work, the
strength of Boost is based on the detailed and informed reviews
submitted by you. A recent effort is trying to secure at least five
people who promise to submit reviews as a precondition to starting
the review period. Consider volunteering for this and even taking the
time to create the review as early as possible. No rule says you can
only work on a review during the review period.

A link to this report will be posted to www.boost.org. If you would
like us to make any modifications or additions to this report before
we do that, please email Ron or John.

If you're a library author and plan on submitting a library for review
in the next 3-6 months, send Ron or John a short description of your
library and we'll add it to the Libraries Under Construction below. We
know that there are many libraries that are near completion, but we
have hard time keeping track all of them. Please keep us informed
about your progress.

Review Queue
============

* Lexer
* Boost.Range (Update)
* Shifted Pointer
* Logging
* Futures - Williams
* Futures - Gaskill
* Join
* Pimpl
* Constrained Value
* Thread Pool
* Polynomial

--------------------

Lexer
-----
:Author: Ben Hanson

:Review Manager: Eric Neibler

:Download: `Boost Sandbox Vault <http://boost-consulting.com/vault/
index.php?
action=downloadfile&filename=boost.lexer.zip&directory=Strings%20-%
20Text%20Processing&>`__

:Description:

    A programmable lexical analyser generator inspired by 'flex'.
    Like flex, it is programmed by the use of regular expressions
    and outputs a state machine as a number of DFAs utilising
    equivalence classes for compression.

Boost.Range (Update)
--------------------
:Author: Neil Groves

:Review Manager: Needed

:Download: `Boost Sandbox Vault <http://www.boost-consulting.com/
vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=range_ex.zip&directory=>`__

:Description: A significant update of the range library, including
   range adapters.

Shifted Pointer
---------------
:Author: Phil Bouchard

:Review Manager: Needed

:Download: `Boost Sandbox Vault <http://www.boost-consulting.com/
vault/index.php?&direction=0&order=&directory=Memory>`__

:Description: Smart pointers are in general optimized for a specific
   resource (memory usage, CPU cycles, user friendliness, ...) depending
   on what the user need to make the most of. The purpose of this smart
   pointer is mainly to allocate the reference counter (or owner) and
   the object itself at the same time so that dynamic memory management
   is simplified thus accelerated and cheaper on the memory map.

Logging
-------
:Author: John Torjo

:Review Manager: Gennadiy Rozental

:Download: http://torjo.com/log2/

:Description:
    Used properly, logging is a very powerful tool. Besides aiding
    debugging/testing, it can also show you how your application is
    used. The Boost Logging Library allows just for that, supporting
    a lot of scenarios, ranging from very simple (dumping all to one
    destination), to very complex (multiple logs, some enabled/some
    not, levels, etc). It features a very simple and flexible
    interface, efficient filtering of messages, thread-safety,
    formatters and destinations, easy manipulation of logs, finding
    the best logger/filter classes based on your application's
    needs, you can define your own macros and much more!

Futures
-------
:Author: Braddock Gaskill

:Review Manager: Tom Brinkman

:Download: http://braddock.com/~braddock/future/

:Description:

   Joint review of the Futures libraries scheduled for 1/5/09-1/20/09.

   The goal of the boost.future library is to provide a definitive
   future implementation with the best features of the numerous
   implementations, proposals, and academic papers floating around, in
the
   hopes to avoid multiple incompatible future implementations in
libraries of
   related concepts (coroutines, active objects, asio, etc). This
library hopes
   to explore the combined implementation of the best future concepts.

Futures
-------
:Author: Anthony Williams

:Review Manager: Tom Brinkman

:Download: http://www.justsoftwaresolutions.co.uk/files/
n2561_future.hpp (code)
           http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2008/
n2561.html (description)

:Description:

   Joint review of the Futures libraries scheduled for 1/5/09-1/20/09.

   This paper proposes a kind of return buffer that takes a
   value (or an exception) in one (sub-)thread and provides the value in
   another (controlling) thread. This buffer provides essentially two
   interfaces:

    * an interface to assign a value as class promise and

    * an interface to wait for, query and retrieve the value (or
exception)
      from the buffer as classes unique_future and shared_future.
While a
      unique_future provides move semantics where the value (or
exception)
      can be retrieved only once, the shared_future provides copy
semantics
      where the value can be retrieved arbitrarily often.

   A typical procedure for working with promises and futures looks like:

    * control thread creates a promise,
    * control thread gets associated future from promise,
    * control thread starts sub-thread,
    * sub-thread calls actual function and assigns the return value to
the promise,
    * control thread waits for future to become ready,
    * control thread retrieves value from future.

   Also proposed is a packaged_task that wraps one callable object and
   provides another one that can be started in its own thread and
assigns
   the return value (or exception) to a return buffer that can be
   accessed through one of the future classes.

   With a packaged_task a typical procedure looks like:

    * control thread creates a packaged_task with a callable object,
    * control thread gets associated future from packaged_task,
    * control thread starts sub-thread, which invokes the packaged_task,
    * packaged_task calls the callable function and assigns the return
value,
    * control thread waits for future to become ready,
    * control thread retrieves value from future.

Notice that we are in the unusual position of having two very
different libraries with the same goal in the queue at the same
time. The Review Wizards would appreciate a discussion of the best way
to hold these two reviews to produce the best possible addition to
Boost.

Join

----
:Author: Yigong Liu
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: http://channel.sourceforge.net/
:Description: Join is an asynchronous, message based C++ concurrency
   library based on join calculus. It is applicable both to
   multi-threaded applications and to the orchestration of asynchronous,
   event-based applications. It follows Comega's design and
   implementation and builds with Boost facilities. It provides a high
   level concurrency API with asynchronous methods, synchronous methods,
   and chords which are "join-patterns" defining the synchronization,
   asynchrony, and concurrency.
Pimpl
-----
:Author: Vladimir Batov
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: `Boost Sandbox Vault <http://www.boost-consulting.com/
vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=Pimpl.zip&directory=&>`__
             http://www.ddj.com/cpp/205918714 (documentation)
:Description: The Pimpl idiom is a simple yet robust technique to
   minimize coupling via the separation of interface and implementation
   and then implementation hiding.  This library provides a convenient
   yet flexible and generic deployment technique for the Pimpl idiom.
   It's seemingly complete and broadly applicable, yet minimal, simple
   and pleasant to use.
Constrained Value
-----------------
:Author: Robert Kawulak
:Review Manager: Jeff Garland
:Download: http://rk.go.pl/f/constrained_value.zip
:Description:
   Review scheduled for 12/1/08-12/10/08
   The Boost Constrained Value library contains class templates useful
   for creating constrained objects. A simple example is an object
   representing an hour of a day, for which only integers from the range
   [0, 23] are valid values:
   ::
       bounded_int<int, 0, 23>::type hour;
       hour = 20; // OK
       hour = 26; // exception!
   Behavior in case of assignment of an invalid value can be
customized. For
   instance, instead of throwing an exception as in the example above,
the value
   may be adjusted to meet the constraint:
   ::
       wrapping_int<int, 0, 255>::type buffer_index;
       buffer_index = 257; // OK: wraps the value to fit in the range
       assert( buffer_index == 1 );
   The library doesn't focus only on bounded objects as in the
examples above --
   virtually any constraint can be imposed by using a predicate:
   ::
       // constraint (a predicate)
       struct is_odd {
	 bool operator () (int i) const
	 { return (i % 2) != 0; }
       };
   ::
       // and the usage is as simple as:
       constrained<int, is_odd> odd_int = 1;
       odd_int += 2; // OK
       ++odd_int; // exception!
   The library has a policy-based design to allow for flexibility in
defining
   constraints and behavior in case of assignment of invalid values.
Policies may
   be configured at compile-time for maximum efficiency or may be
changeable at
   runtime if such dynamic functionality is needed.
Thread Pool
-----------
:Author: Oliver Kowalke
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: `Boost Sandbox Vault <http://www.boostpro.com/vault/
index.php?action=downloadfile&amp;filename=boost-threadpool.
2.tar.gz&amp;directory=Concurrent%20Programming>`__
:Description:
   The library provides:
   - thread creation policies: determines the managemnt of worker  
threads
       - fixed set of threads in pool
       - create workerthreads on demand (depending on context)
       - let worker threads ime out after certain idle time
   - channel policies: manages access to queued tasks
      - bounded channel with high and low watermark for queuing tasks
      - unbounded channel with unlimited numer of queued tasks
      - rendezvous syncron hand-over between producer and consumer
threads
   - queueing policy: determines how tasks will be removed from channel
      - FIFO
      - LIFO
      - priority queue (attribute assigned to task)
      - smart insertions and extractions (for instance remove oldest
task with
        certain attribute by newst one)
   - tasks can be chained and lazy submit of taks is also supported
(thanks to
     Braddocks future library).
   - returns a task object from the submit function. The task it self  
can
     be interrupted if its is cooperative (means it has some
interruption points
     in its code -> ``this_thread::interruption_point()`` ).
Polynomial
----------
:Author: Pawel Kieliszczyk
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: `Boost Sandbox Vault <http://www.boostpro.com/vault/
index.php?
action=downloadfile&amp;filename=polynomial.zip&amp;directory=>`__
:Description:
   The library was written to enable fast and faithful polynomial
manupulation.
   It provides:
    - main arithmetic operators (+, -, * using FFT, /, %),
    - gcd,
    - different methods of evaluation (Horner Scheme, Compensated Horner
      Algorithm, by preconditioning),
    - derivatives and integrals,
    - interpolation,
    - conversions between various polynomial forms (special functions  
for
      creating Chebyshev, Hermite, Laguerre and Legendre form).
Libraries under development
===========================
Please let us know of any libraries you are currently
developing that you intend to submit for review.

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