Re: [boost] "boost cold shoulder" (was proposal for #pragma oncesupport)

Subject: Re: [boost] "boost cold shoulder" (was proposal for #pragma oncesupport)
From: Christopher Jefferson (chris_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-06-10 11:44:16

On 10 Jun 2009, at 16:39, Sid Sacek wrote:

> John and Pete,
>
> I do appreciate your insights into the inner workings of the Boost
> community.  I'm not discouraged about the lack of interest in my
> suggestion, but I was somewhat surprised.  Boost libraries are one of
> those things that make life better for programming engineers.  I
> believed that was the unwritten philosophy behind Boost, to "Make Life
> Better."  Extending that philosophical notion, the Boost libraries  
> would
> also know about the shortcomings of compilers and operating systems  
> and
> help to improve their performance as well, simply because it "makes  
> life
> better."
>
> I suppose I must have been mistaken about that... perhaps not  
> everybody
> in the Boost community has feelings of magnanimity and charity.
>

The big problem I have is that there is no evidence that #pragma once  
would actually help in practice. It helps in some super-special case,  
involving 200 basically empty files that all include each other and  
nothing else. I suspect (without any evidence) that if someone came  
along and said "I added #pragma once to the boost headers, and it sped  
up compilation by X% on windows, and didn't slow things down on  
linux / mac os x, and it didn't break any test or library", they might  
well get a less luke-warm response.

Chris