Re: [boost] C++ committee meeting report

Subject: Re: [boost] C++ committee meeting report
From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-06-30 21:55:13

On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 10:40 AM, Klaim - Joël Lamotte <mjklaim_at_[hidden]>
wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 2:53 PM, beet <r.berlich_at_gemfony.eu> wrote:
>
> > Any chance of bringing Boost.Serialization in for C++17 ? It is
> > established and in production use since years, and Robert did a great
> > job with this library.
> >
>
> There is work going on for adding (compile-time) reflection to C++.
> I'm not sure if it makes a serialization library obsolete (there is no
> voted proposal so far if I understand correctly)
>  but my understanding is that the committee first want reflection to base
> solutions on for fixing networking issues.
>

AFAIK, the committee has never held even preliminary straw polls on any
relationship between networking and reflection. The Reflection Study Group
is still at a very early stage, and has no complete proposal before it, let
alone started to build a Reflection TS working paper. The LEWG has held a
couple of straw polls on starting a Networking working paper, and if those
are any guide the LEWG is not in a mode to wait for anything.

There is only one way to find out what the LEWG would think about a
Serialization library proposal. Write the proposal and submit it. If a
Serialization library proposal would be much stronger with compiler
support, then the proposal can include a requirement for compiler support.
But until the committee and its sub-groups has a written proposal before
it, nothing happens.

Think of Type Traits. If the Library had waited until there was full
language support for type traits as a language feature, we would still be
waiting. When the standard library added type traits, with a requirement
for compiler support, it was clearly understood that future events could
make the type traits library obsolete. That didn't stop the addition of
John Maddock's type-traits library. Same thing could happen with
serialization.

--Beman