Re: [boost] [review] Formal review period for VMD library begins today, Aug 21, and ends Sat, Aug 30

Subject: Re: [boost] [review] Formal review period for VMD library begins today, Aug 21, and ends Sat, Aug 30
From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-08-22 08:20:37

On 21 Aug 2014 at 21:24, Edward Diener wrote:

> >> http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/eldiener/variadic_macro_data/master/doc/html/index.html
> >
> > Firstly that viewer kept failing for me, so I gave up quite quickly.
> 
> What failure do you get ? Maybe I can reproduce it.

It doesn't work at all for me on Chrome.

With IE it somewhat works, but from time to time the github website 
says it is overloaded and please try again later. This is irritating. 
It could be that European users get different servers to US users.

> OTOH if you choose to clone the library in your modularboost/libs/vmd 
> the top-level index.html link should work perfectly.

That involves more work than I wish to do right now. Right now I 
merely wish to find out if I could contribute a meaningful review.

> > However from what I read I ask this: why is this library useful?
> 
> The introduction explains in general the functionality in the library 
> that would make it useful. Did you read the introduction ?

Yes. I get what it does. Not why would anyone need this.

> > What
> > problems does it solve?
> 
> Does a library have to solve specific problems to be used by others ? 
> The usefulness of a library is that you can do things with it that would 
> be much harder to hand-craft without it.

The answer is no, but to enter Boost yes. It's very hard for me or I 
suspect anyone to vote on this if I have no idea what it's useful 
for. Otherwise someone could submit a randomly generated library and 
claim it should enter Boost, and we couldn't refuse.

> I may have not made too much of an issue in the documentation, although 
> I did devote a section to it toward the end of the documentation ( see 
> 'Input as dynamic types' ), but the general "problem" it solves is being 
> able to write macros where, within the constraints of the types which 
> the library can parse, you can take different paths as far as output 
> generaation depending on the type of any particular macro input. You can 
> therefore design macros to be more flexible than you might ordinarily have.

I get this is all very clever. And if this library were being 
proposed for a suite of C libraries, I'd be all over this like no 
tomorrow.

I don't get how this is useful, or wise for C++ however. If you can 
show me something it can do which is a pain point for many which 
cannot be achieved using C++ 14, you get my vote. Otherwise I don't 
see the use case given the much superior alternatives.

Niall

-- 
ned Productions Limited Consulting
http://www.nedproductions.biz/ 
http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/