Re: [boost] [Booster] Or boost is useless for library developers

Subject: Re: [boost] [Booster] Or boost is useless for library developers
From: Christopher Jefferson (chris_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-05-20 12:52:09

On 20 May 2010, at 17:38, Artyom wrote:

>> 
>> What I find strange is that Boost librariy developers, in
>> general, seems to
>> agree that template bloat is of no or little concern,
>> #include dependencies
>> is of no or little concern, and compilation time for
>> end-user is of
>> absolutely no concern. 
> 
> 
> 
> You just said what I was thinking about. There is some kind
> of Urban Myths in Boost community
> 
> - Headers always better then sources.
This one is a matter of person taste but...
> - Inline functions is best way to improve performance.
I've found this to be true in my own work. So have lots of other people. Prove us wrong.
> - Concepts are **always** better then inheritance (even if they
>  triple the size of the code).
What do you mean by better? They are more flexable, and often perform better. If you disagree, prove us wrong.

If you could produce code which had the same performance, was more flexable and compiled faster, I am certain many people would be happy to use it.

Perhaps there is also space in C++ for more "boring" libraries, which just aim to implement a solid ABI-stable interface in a clean way. There is no reason such libraries could not exist. But they are not particularly interesting to work on, so it can be hard to motivate people to donate their time to them for no benefit.

If there was demand, backed by substantial amounts of money, for a boost branch which was ABI-stable, I am sure someone would produce one.

Chris