Re: [boost] 5 Observations - My experience with the boost libraries

Subject: Re: [boost] 5 Observations - My experience with the boost libraries
From: Fabio Fracassi (f.fracassi_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-03-24 17:17:24

Jonathan Franklin wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 10:06 PM, Emil Dotchevski
> <emildotchevski_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>> Tom's observations are just that, observations. In my experience, they
>> are correct. It doesn't mean that actionable proposals are practical
>> or possible.
> 
> My experience turns out to be quite different.  And that's fine.  No
> single person represents the entire boost, let alone C/C++ developer
> community.
> 
> If no one has anything further to add that will actually benefit
> boost, then this thread should be ruthlessly abandoned.  But thanks
> for sharing. ;-)
> 

I think there is one thing. Tom charactarizes Libraries such as GIL or 
the aforementioned VSIPL++ as "just" a wrapper around C code. While in a 
certain sense this is true, IMVHO this also misses the point that 
Jonathan also raises, i.e. The C part in graphics/HPC programming is the 
equivalent of the "inline Assembler" of earlier days.
That means that you use them when you have to, but wrap these code parts 
aggressively.

Now to get the curve back to boost: I think that boosts great advantage 
is that it can help to develop *portable* wrappers of this kind. GIL is 
  a great example btw, if I want to develop a wrapper around some OpenGL 
functionality I can use GIL as an abstraction for e.g. textures. I could 
  of course develop my own abstraction (and have, too - but it would 
never get as good as a boost gil is) but I couldn't expect anyone 
outside my  sphere of influence to use it.

This is gets more important the higher I want to raise the abstraction, 
because there are more smaller abstractions I have to use (e.g. any, 
variant, shared_ptr, or ...)
This is also why I disagree with point 3 of Toms observations, because 
IMVHO it is a great boon to know that I have *all* the small boost tools 
at my disposal, and that it becomes fairly automatic that programmers 
use the boost version instead of rolling their own, or even go hunting 
for something else.

Regards,

Fabio