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

Subject: Re: [boost] [Booster] Or boost is useless for library developers
From: Artyom (artyomtnk_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-05-20 15:37:50

First of Boost I didn't proposed Booster to be replacement of
boost as I don't really care about full Windows support.

So don't take a look on Booster as what Boost should be.

> > 
> > I don't think that Booster is the way to go because I
> created it for
> > my partial needs rather needs of Boost community.
> > 
> > For example:
> > 
> > - Booster.Thread is just wrapper of
> pthreads/pthreads-win32 with boost
> >  like API.
> 
> Oh please no!!!
> 
> Why should I be forced to use a GPL'ed external library
> rather than a "first class citisen" that talks to the
> platform API's directly.


1. pthreads-win32 is LESSER GPL library (not GPL) and many-many project
   use it
2. Boost.Thread is just C++ implementation of Pthreads standard.
   Every function that exists in Boost.Threads exists in pthreads
   and other way.

   Boost thread is designed AFTER pthreads concepts and API.


> 
> > - Booster.Regex is just a wrapper of PCRE.
> 
> Oh heavens.  So lets see... no wide character support,

IMHO wide characters should be vanished from C++ it is the worst way
to represent Unicode (and I know thing or two about Unicode).

See: 

- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1049947/should-utf-16-be-considered-harmful
- http://cppcms.sourceforge.net/boost_locale/html/tutorial.html#myths

And PCRE supports Unicode quite well with UTF-8 support.
And if you really want Unicode - only ICU can help you.


> no support for segmented containers (think really large
> texts stored in discontinous memory - I've had people using
> this support to search multi-gigabyte texts that could never
> be stored in memory or searched via a C interface).

Ahhhhh... Are you running regex over multi-gigabyte texts?

Then something wrong with your design.

 
> BTW do you realise that Boost.Regex has had an ABI stable
> POSIX-standard compatible C interface for the last um.... 12
> years.... and yes that's since before Boost existed.

No I do not. To be honest I'm glad to hear it (really...)
I'll take a look of I can extract Boost.Regex as is for Booster.

And it would be easy to put it into boost-abi


> 
> I'll end with this thought: "templates generate no more
> code bloat than non-templates unless they are used
> gratuitously".  For example instantiating
> vector<int> and vector<long> in the same program
> on a platform where int and long are the same size should
> probably be considered a mistake.  But that's no reason
> to ditch std::vector, just to be sensible in ones usage.
> 

Nobody tells you make vector non-template or non-inlined as vector
is just type-safe array with iterators just wrappers of pointers.

But I do not think that networking library should be inlined (for example)

It is the point of design.

Best,
  Artyom