Re: [boost] [local] Review

Subject: Re: [boost] [local] Review
From: Gregory Crosswhite (gcrosswhite_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-11-18 22:34:35

On Nov 19, 2011, at 4:49 AM, Thomas Heller wrote:

> For everything else, there already exist a couple of solutions (Boost.Bind, Boost.Lambda and Boost.Phoenix). I would like to see improvements in ease of use in these libraries instead of advertising a completely macro based solutions.

In no way are Boost.Bind, Boost.Lamda, and Boost.Phoenix equivalent to Boost.Local in functionality in practice.  In Boost.Local, you have to learn some new (relatively straightforward) syntax for declaring the local function, but the function body is plain C++.  For the other libraries by contrast you have to learn a completely new syntax for writing *all* of the code in your function, and if you get something wrong you get literally pages of error messages that give you no insight as to what happened.  The learning curve for Boost.Local is lightyears ahead of the competitors.

I personally don't like the verbosity of Boost.Local so I often prefer to start by using Boost.Lambda instead for small functions instead, but I can't tell you how many times I have eventually decided to give up and just use Boost.Local because it was becoming a waste of my time to figure out what the obscure error messages were telling me about what went wrong.

Cheers,
Greg