Re: [boost] ASIO into the standard

Subject: Re: [boost] ASIO into the standard
From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-07-02 17:59:45

On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 9:17 AM, Niall Douglas <s_sourceforge_at_[hidden]>
wrote:

> On 2 Jul 2014 at 6:20, james wrote:
>
> > > I think the wicked hard problem with ASIO will be deciding what
> > > subset of it to standardise. For example, I would wonder if strands
> > > or coroutines or any of the Windows support would make it.
> > It seems to me that unless you either:
> >   - make it easy to extend the set of 'devices' it can talk to
> > or
> >   - standardise a cross-platform 'device' concept that allows
> > straightforward
> >    extension
> > (both of which are hard) then it shouldn't be in the standard at all.
> >
> > I certainly wouldn't welcome something that didn't work well on Windows,
> and
> > last time I tried to integrate a different sort of stream, I gave up in
> > a maze of twisty
> > little templates.
>
> You must remember that from the perspective of ISO, the only
> engineering standards which exist are other ISO standards. That in
> this case equals POSIX. This is why I said that Windows support
> cannot be standardised and would have to be omitted.
> pletely agree on this sentiment.
>

You have been misinformed.

ISO rules are somewhat different for dealing with documents that are not
ISO standards, but mostly that is just a matter of careful drafting. For
example, see the  ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2, Rules for the structure and
drafting of International Standards, section 6.6.3 Use of trade names and
trademarks.

The C++ standard and its TRs and TSes support Windows, as well as a lot of
other operating systems, and that is one of the criteria for evaluating
proposals to the committee. Any proposal that cannot support a common
operating system would likely be dead on arrival.

Look at the Filesystem TS for an example. It mentions Windows and several
other operating systems by name, and has a compliance section that explains
how that TS copes with differences between platforms.

--Beman