Re: [boost] Futures Review Starts Today - January 5, 2009

Subject: Re: [boost] Futures Review Starts Today - January 5, 2009
From: Phil Endecott (spam_from_boost_dev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-01-06 17:44:39

Tom Brinkman wrote:
> Futures Review Starts Today - January 5, 2009

This is not a review.  Maybe it's a "meta-review".

One of the things that Boost tries to be is a proving-ground for things 
that are heading towards C++ standardisation.  In this case it seems to 
have gone topsy-turvy: the C++ standards committee have approved an 
implementation of futures and now Boost is reviewing two libraries 
neither of which is an exact implementation of the standard proposal.  
This doesn't seem right to me.  So:

- The idea of futures looks useful and I think Boost should have it.

- It would not be sensible to have anything other than something 
conforming to the proposed standard, except for any hacks necessary for 
pre-0x compatibility and perhaps for non-conflicting extra features.

- I believe that both of the proposals were ready for review some time 
ago.  I'm unsure of the exact chronology but I have the impression that 
if they had been reviewed by Boost more promptly then perhaps that 
review could have been available to the standards committee.

- I understand that the slowness of the review queue is a result of too 
few review managers for too many proposed libraries.  Assuming that the 
pool of review managers can't be pressed to give up more of their time, 
maybe the pool could be widened by relaxing the required 
qualifications: although reviews often require that the review manager 
does a lot of collating of opinions, I'm not aware of many cases where 
the essential accept/reject decision has been very difficult to make or 
is different from what a vote-count of reviewers would have said 
(though maybe I'm wrong).  Alternatively maybe the other end of the 
problem should be fixed by attempting to limit the scope of 
contributions to focus more on "core" features that might one day end 
up in std::c++.

Regards,

Phil.