Re: [boost] TR2 is dead; multiple TR's coming instead

Subject: Re: [boost] TR2 is dead; multiple TR's coming instead
From: Thomas Klimpel (Thomas.Klimpel_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-02-19 10:36:35

Cory Nelson wrote:
> As someone who does not have the means to attend these meetings,
> I hope someone will be able to champion variant, optional, and intrusive.

The "variant" functionality is something I have often seen in "real" code, even so it never used boost::variant. Most often it was homegrown, but sometimes also QVariant (from qt). But QVariant is actually more related to boost::any than boost::variant. So what about boost::any?

I have seen boost::optional in "real" code, but that code wasn't very convincing (to say the least). But I see that it has real use cases for class members,  containers, and for optionally returning a value. The free "get_pointer" function is especially useful for efficiency and generic code (assuming it is specialized for all "pointer like" objects, including real pointers), but I don't fully understand why the equivalent member function "get_ptr" has a different name.

I though more than once about actually using "intrusive" in my code, and I guess it would really have a positive impact on performance at the places where I considered using it. What is also intriguing about "intrusive" is the huge collection of containers offered with it. The only drawback is that I could imagine even more container types that would make sense for "intrusive", but probably already the existing collection of container types will be "too large" for the standard.

Regards,
Thomas