Boost logo

Boost :

Subject: [boost] Review Wizard Report for May 2010
From: Ronald Garcia (rxg_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-05-26 12:04:20


==============================================
Review Wizard Status Report for May 2010
==============================================

News
====

Boost 1.42 Released
   New Libraries: UUID
   Revised Libraries: Asio, Circular Buffer, Fusion, Graph, Integer,
Iostreams, Program.Options, Property Map, Proto, Regex, Spirit,
Unordered, Xpressive

Meta State Machine (MSM) Library Accepted

Boost 1.43 Released
   New Libraries: Functional/Factory, Functional/Forward
   Revised Libraries: Range, Accumulators, Array, Asio, Fusion,
Iostreams, Multi-index Containers, Proto, Random, Spirit, Thread,
Unordered, Uuid, Wave, Xpressive

Open Issues
===========

The Constrained Value Library was reviewed in December 2008 but no
review result has been reported. We would appreciate it if someone who
knows the review manager, Jeff Garland, could contact him.

The following libraries have been accepted to Boost, but have not yet
been submitted to SVN:

* Time Series (accepted August 2007).
* Floating Point Utilities (accepted March 2008).
* Futures (accepted April 2009).
* Polygon Library (accepted November 2009).
* Geometry Library (accepted November 2009).
* Meta State Machine (accepted January 2010).

The following libraries have been accepted provisionally to Boost, but
have not been submitted for mini-review and full acceptance:

* Switch (accepted provisionally January 2008)
* Phoenix (accepted provisionally September 2008)

General Announcements
=====================

As always, we need experienced review managers. The review queue has
grown substantially but we have few volunteers, so manage
reviews if possible and if not please make sure to watch the review
schedule and participate. Please take a look at the list of libraries
in need of managers and check out their descriptions. In general
review managers are active boost participants or library
contributors. If you can serve as review manager for any of them,
email Ron Garcia or John Phillips, "garcia at osl dot iu dot edu"
and "phillips at mps dot ohio-state dot edu" respectively.

We are also suffering from a lack of reviewers. While we all
understand time pressures and the need to complete paying work, the
strength of Boost is based on the detailed and informed reviews
submitted by you. A recent effort is trying to secure at least five
people who promise to submit reviews as a precondition to starting
the review period. Consider volunteering for this and even taking the
time to create the review as early as possible. No rule says you can
only work on a review during the review period.

A link to this report will be posted to www.boost.org. If you would
like us to make any modifications or additions to this report before
we do that, please email Ron or John.

If you're a library author and plan on submitting a library for review
in the next 3-6 months, send Ron or John a short description of your
library and we'll add it to the Libraries Under Construction below. We
know that there are many libraries that are near completion, but we
have hard time keeping track all of them. Please keep us informed
about your progress.

The included review queue isn't a classic queue. It is more an
unordered list of the libraries awaiting review. As such, any library
in the queue can be reviewed once the developer is ready and a review
manager works with the wizards and the developer to schedule a
review. It is not FIFO.

Review Queue
============

* Lexer
* Shifted Pointer
* Logging
* Join
* Pimpl
* Task
* Endian
* Conversion
* Sorting
* GIL.IO
* AutoBuffer
* String Convert
* Containers
* Type Traits Extensions
* Interthreads
* Bitfield
* Lockfree
* Fiber
* Chrono
* Sequence Properties
* Static Size Linear Algebra
* Locale
--------------------

Lexer
-----
:Author: Ben Hanson

:Review Manager: Eric Neibler

:Download: `Boost Vault <http://boost-consulting.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=boost.lexer.zip&directory=Strings%20-%20Text%20Processing
>`__

:Description:
     A programmable lexical analyser generator inspired by 'flex'.
     Like flex, it is programmed by the use of regular expressions
     and outputs a state machine as a number of DFAs utilising
     equivalence classes for compression.

Shifted Pointer
---------------
:Author: Phil Bouchard

:Review Manager: Needed

:Download: `Boost Vault <http://www.boost-consulting.com/vault/index.php?&direction=0&order=&directory=Memory
>`__

:Description:
   Smart pointers are in general optimized for a specific resource
   (memory usage, CPU cycles, user friendliness, ...) depending on
   what the user need to make the most of. The purpose of this smart
   pointer is mainly to allocate the reference counter (or owner) and
   the object itself at the same time so that dynamic memory management
   is simplified thus accelerated and cheaper on the memory map.

Logging
-------
:Author: John Torjo

:Review Manager: Gennadiy Rozental

:Download: http://torjo.com/log2/

:Description: Used properly, logging is a very powerful tool. Besides
aiding
     debugging/testing, it can also show you how your application is
     used. The Boost Logging Library allows just for that, supporting
     a lot of scenarios, ranging from very simple (dumping all to one
     destination), to very complex (multiple logs, some enabled/some
     not, levels, etc). It features a very simple and flexible
     interface, efficient filtering of messages, thread-safety,
     formatters and destinations, easy manipulation of logs, finding
     the best logger/filter classes based on your application's
     needs, you can define your own macros and much more!

Join

----
:Author: Yigong Liu
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: http://channel.sourceforge.net/
:Description: Join is an asynchronous, message based C++ concurrency
   library based on join calculus. It is applicable both to
   multi-threaded applications and to the orchestration of asynchronous,
   event-based applications. It follows Comega's design and
   implementation and builds with Boost facilities. It provides a high
   level concurrency API with asynchronous methods, synchronous methods,
   and chords which are "join-patterns" defining the synchronization,
   asynchrony, and concurrency.
Pimpl
-----
:Author: Vladimir Batov
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: | `Boost Vault <http://www.boost-consulting.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=Pimpl.zip&directory=& 
 >`__
                     | http://www.ddj.com/cpp/205918714 (documentation)
:Description: The Pimpl idiom is a simple yet robust technique to
   minimize coupling via the separation of interface and implementation
   and then implementation hiding.   This library provides a convenient
   yet flexible and generic deployment technique for the Pimpl idiom.
   It's seemingly complete and broadly applicable, yet minimal, simple
   and pleasant to use.
Task
----
:Author: Oliver Kowalke
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: `Boost Vault <http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&amp;filename=boost-threadpool.2.tar.gz&amp;directory=Concurrent%20Programming 
 >`__
:Description:
  Formerly called Thread Pool
  The library provides:
  * thread creation policies:
    * determines the management of worker threads:
    * fixed set of threads in pool
    * create workerthreads on demand (depending on context)
    * let worker threads ime out after certain idle time
  * channel policies: manages access to queued tasks:
        * bounded channel with high and low watermark for queuing tasks
        * unbounded channel with unlimited number of queued tasks
        * rendezvous syncron hand-over between producer and consumer  
threads
  * queueing policy: determines how tasks will be removed from channel:
        * FIFO
        * LIFO
        * priority queue (attribute assigned to task)
        * smart insertions and extractions (for instance remove oldest  
task with
          certain attribute by newest one)
  * tasks can be chained and lazy submit of taks is also supported  
(thanks to
    Braddocks future library).
  * returns a task object from the submit function. The task it self can
    be interrupted if its is cooperative (means it has some  
interruption points
    in its code -> ``this_thread::interruption_point()`` ).
Endian
------
:Author: Beman Dawes
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: http://mysite.verizon.net/beman/endian-0.10.zip
:Description:
Conversion
----------
:Author: Vicente Botet
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: `Boost Vault <http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&amp;filename=conversion.zip&amp;directory=Utilities&amp; 
 >`__
:Description:
  Generic explicit conversion between unrelated types.
  Boost.Conversion provides:
      * a generic ``convert_to`` function which can be specialized by  
the user to
        make explicit conversion between unrelated types.
      * a generic ``assign_to`` function which can be specialized by  
the user to
        make explicit assignation between unrelated types.
      * conversion between ``std::complex`` of explicitly convertible  
types.
      * conversion between ``std::pair`` of explicitly convertible  
types.
      * conversion between ``boost::optional`` of explicitly  
convertible types.
      * conversion between ``boost::rational`` of explicitly  
convertible types.
      * conversion between ``boost::interval`` of explicitly  
convertible types.
      * conversion between ``boost::chrono::time_point`` and  
``boost::ptime``.
      * conversion between ``boost::chrono::duration`` and  
``boost::time_duration``.
Sorting
-------
:Author: Steven Ross
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: `Boost Vault <http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&amp;filename=algorithm_sorting.zip 
 >`__
:Description:
  A grouping of 3 templated hybrid radix/comparison-based sorting
  algorithms that provide superior worst-case and average-case
  performance to std::sort: integer_sort, which sorts fixed-size data
  types that support a rightshift (default of >>) and a comparison
  (default of <) operator.   float_sort, which sorts standard
  floating-point numbers by safely casting them to integers.
  string_sort, which sorts variable-length data types, and is optimized
  for 8-bit character strings.
  All 3 algorithms have O(n(k/s + s)) runtime where k is the number of
  bits in the data type and s is a constant, and limited memory overhead
  (in the kB for realistic inputs).   In testing, integer_sort varies
  from 35% faster to 8X as fast as std::sort, depending on processor,
  compiler optimizations, and data distribution.   float_sort is roughly
  7X as fast as std::sort on x86 processors.   string_sort is roughly 2X
  as fast as std::sort.
GIL.IO
------
:Author: Christian Henning
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: `GIL Google Code Vault <http://gil-contributions.googlecode.com/files/rc2.zip 
 >`__
:Description: I/O extension for boost::gil which allows reading and
   writing of/in various image formats ( tiff, jpeg, png, etc ). This
   review will also include the Toolbox extension which adds some common
   functionality to gil, such as new color spaces, algorithms, etc.
AutoBuffer
----------
:Author: Thorsten Ottosen
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: `Here <http://www.cs.aau.dk/~nesotto/boost/ 
auto_buffer.zip>`__
:Description:
   Boost.AutoBuffer provides a container for efficient dynamic, local  
buffers.
   Furthermore, the container may be used as an alternative to  
std::vector,
   offering greater flexibility and sometimes better performance.
String Convert
--------------
:Author: Vladimir Batov
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: `Boost Vault <http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&amp;filename=boost-string-convert.zip 
 >`__
:Description:
  The library takes the approach of boost::lexical_cast in the area of
  string-to-type and type-to-string conversions, builds on the past
  boost::lexical_cast experience and advances that conversion
  functionality further to additionally provide:
   * throwing and non-throwing conversion-failure behavior;
   * support for the default value to be returned when conversion fails;
   * two types of the conversion-failure check -- basic and better/safe;
   * formatting support based on the standard I/O Streams and the  
standard
     (or user-defined) I/O Stream-based manipulators
     (like std::hex, std::scientific, etc.);
   * locale support;
   * support for boost::range-compliant char and wchar_t-based string  
containers;
   * no DefaultConstructibility requirement for the Target type;
   * consistent framework to uniformly incorporate any type-to-type  
conversions.
  It is an essential tool with applications making extensive use of
  configuration files or having to process/prepare considerable amounts
  of data in, say, XML, etc.
Containers
----------
:Author: Ion Gaztanaga
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=boost.move.container.zip&directory=Containers&
:Documentation: http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/move/libs/container/doc/html/index.html
:Description:
  Boost.Container library implements several well-known containers,
  including STL containers. The aim of the library is to offers advanced
  features not present in standard containers or to offer the latest
  standard draft features for compilers that comply with C++03.
Type Traits Extensions
--------------------------
:Author: Frederic Bron
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: http://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/browser/sandbox/type_traits
:Description:
  The purpose of the addition is to add type traits to detect if types  
T and U
  are comparable in the sense of <, <=, >, >=, == or != operators,  
i.e. if
  t<u has a sens when t is of type T and u of type U (same for <=, >,  
 >=, ==,
  !=).
  The following traits are added:
  is_equal_to_comparable<T,U>
  is_greater_comparable<T,U>
  is_greater_equal_comparable<T,U>
  is_less_comparable<T,U>
  is_less_equal_comparable<T,U>
  is_not_equal_to_comparable<T,U>
  The names are based on the corresponding names of the standard
  template library (<functional> header, section 20.3.3 of the
  standard).
  The code has the following properties:
  * returns true if t<u is meaningful and returns a value convertible  
to bool
  * returns false if t<u is meaningless.
  * fails with compile time error if t<u is meaningful and returns void
  (a possibility to avoid compile time error would be to return true
  with an operator, trick but this has little sens as returning false
  would be better)
InterThreads
-------------------
:Author: Vicente J. Botet Escriba
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: `Boost Vault <http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&amp;filename=interthreads.zip&amp;directory=Concurrent%20Programming&amp; 
 >`__
:Description:
  Boost.InterThreads extends Boost.Threads adding some features:
        * thread decorator: thread_decorator allows to define
	 setup/cleanup functions which will be called only once by
	 thread: setup before the thread function and cleanup at thread
	 exit.
        * thread specific shared pointer: this is an extension of the
	 thread_specific_ptr providing access to this thread specific
	 context from other threads. As it is shared the stored pointer
	 is a shared_ptr instead of a raw one.
        * thread keep alive mechanism: this mechanism allows to detect
	 threads that do not prove that they are alive by calling to the
	 keep_alive_point regularly. When a thread is declared dead a
	 user provided function is called, which by default will abort
	 the program.
        * thread tuple: defines a thread groupe where the number of
	 threads is know statically and the threads are created at
	 construction time.
        * set_once: a synchonizer that allows to set a variable only  
once,
	 notifying to the variable value to whatever is waiting for that.
        * thread_tuple_once: an extension of the boost::thread_tuple  
which
	 allows to join the thread finishing the first, using for that
	 the set_once synchronizer.
        * thread_group_once: an extension of the boost::thread_group  
which
	 allows to join the thread finishing the first, using for that
	 the set_once synchronizer.
  (thread_decorator and thread_specific_shared_ptr) are based on the
  original implementation of threadalert written by Roland Schwarz.
  Boost.InterThreads extends Boost.Threads adding thread setup/cleanup
  decorator, thread specific shared pointer, thread keep alive
  mechanism and thread tuples.
Bitfield
---------------
:Author: Vicente J. Botet Escriba
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/bitfield with  
documentation available at http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/bitfield/libs/bitfield/doc/index.html
:Description:
  Portable bitfields traits. Boost.Bitfield consists of:
   * a generic bitfield traits class providing generic getter and  
setter methods.
   * a BOOST_BITFIELD_DCL macro making easier the definition of the  
bitfield traits and the bitfield getter and setter functions.
Lockfree
------------------
:Author: Tim Blechmann
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&amp;filename=boost_lockfree-241109.zip&amp;directory=Concurrent%20Programming&amp 
;
:Documentation: http://tim.klingt.org/boost_lockfree/
:Description:
  boost.lockfree provides implementations of lock-free data structures.
  lock-free data structures can be accessed by multiple threads without
  the necessity of blocking synchronization primitives such as guards.
  lock-free data structures can be used in real-time systems, where
  blocking algorithms may lead to high worst-case execution times, to
  avoid priority inversion, or to increase the scalability for
  multi-processor machines.
  boost.lockfree provides:
   * boost::lockfree::fifo, a lock-free fifo queue
   * boost::lockfree::stack, a lock-free stack
  the code is available from from my personal git repository:
   * git://tim.klingt.org/boost_lockfree.git
   * http://tim.klingt.org/git?p=boost_lockfree.git
Fiber
-----
:Author: Oliver Kowalke
:Review Manager: Needed
Download: http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&amp;filename=boost.fiber-0.3.7.zip&amp;directory=Concurrent%20Programming&amp 
;
:Description: C++ Library for launching fibers (micro-threads) and
  synchronizing data between the fibers.
Chrono
------
:Author: Vicente Botet
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&amp;filename=chrono.zip&amp;directory=System&amp 
;
:Documentation: http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/chrono/libs/chrono/doc/html/index.html 
.
:Description:
  The Boost Chrono library provides:
  The C++0x Standard Library's common_type.
  The C++0x Standard Library's compile-time rational arithmetic.
  The C++0x Standard Library's time utilities, including:
  Class template duration
  Class template time_point
  Clocks:
  system_clock
  monotonic_clock
  high_resolution_clock
  typeof registration for classes duration and time_point
  Process clocks:
  process_real_CPU_clocks, capturing real-CPU times.
  process_user_CPU_clocks, capturing user-CPU times.
  process_system_CPU_clocks, capturing system-CPU times.
  process_cpu_clock, tuple-like class capturing at once real, user- 
CPU, and system-CPU times.
  Stopwatches:
  stopwatch, capturing elapsed Clock times.
  stopwatch_accumulator, capturing cummulated elapsed Clock times.
  scoped helper classes allowing to pairwise start/stop operations,  
suspend/resume and resume/suspend a Stopwatch.
  Stopclocks or Stopwatch reporters:
  stopwatch_reporter, convenient reporting of models of Stopwatch  
results.
  stopclock<Clock> shortcut of stopwatch_reporter<stopwatch<Clock>>
  Support wide characters for stopwatch formatters
Sequence Properties
-------------------
:Author: Grant Erickson
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&amp;filename=creasing.zip&amp;directory=Algorithms
:Description:
  The creasing algorithm templates define four template functions for
  determining the order properties of sequences, specifically:
     * Increasing
     * Decreasing
     * Strictly Increasing
     * Strictly Decreasing
  The implementation is a fairly trivial composition of the STL  
adjacent_find,
  not2 and {greater,less,greater_equal,less_equal}.
  For the purposes of sequence ordering validation, using these  
templates is
  more efficient and straightforward than creating a temporary, sorted  
version
  of some sequence and comparing it against the original sequence.
  Example:
   ::
	bool
	CheckPoints(const Points & inPoints)
	{
	    const bool strictlyIncreasing =
               is_strictly_increasing(inPoints.begin(),
				       inPoints.end());
	    if (!strictlyIncreasing) {
		cerr << "Points must be in increasing order with "
			"no duplicate values."
		     << endl;
	    }
	    return strictlyIncreasing;
	}
Static Size Linear Algebra
--------------------------
:Author: Emil Dotchevski
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download:
:Description:
Locale
------
:Author: Artyom Beilis
:Review Manager: Needed
:Download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cppcms/files/boost_locale/boost_locale_for_review.zip/download
:Description:
Boost.Locale is powerful localization library that provides powerful
localization tool extending existing built-in C++ localization  
facilities
in Unicode aware way.
Libraries under development
===========================
Persistent
----------
:Author: Tim Blechmann
:Description:
  A library, based on Boost.Serialization, that provides access to  
persistent
  objects with an interface as close as possible to accessing regular  
objects
  in memory.
  * object ownership concepts equivalent to the ones used by  
Boost.SmartPtr:
    shared, weak, scoped (and raw)
  * ACID transactions, including recovery after a crash and  
"Serializable"
    isolation level
  * concurrent transactions, nested transactions, distributed  
transactions
  * concurrent access containers: STL containers whose nodes are  
implemented as
    persistent objects and can be accessed without moving the  
container to
    memory. Concurrent transactions modifying the container are only  
repeated in
    the rare cases the same container node is changed simultanisouly  
by 2
    threads.
  * extensible by other transactional resources, e.g. an object  
relational
    mapper based on the upcoming Boost.Rdb library. Multiple resources  
can be
    combined to one database, with distributed transactions among them.
  Please let us know of any libraries you are currently
  developing that you intend to submit for review.
See http://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/LibrariesUnderConstruction
for a current listing of libraries under development.

Boost list run by bdawes at acm.org, gregod at cs.rpi.edu, cpdaniel at pacbell.net, john at johnmaddock.co.uk