[boost] Update on status of C++ 11 only Boost fork/modular distro

Subject: [boost] Update on status of C++ 11 only Boost fork/modular distro
From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-10-07 07:47:02

Dear all,

You may remember me saying these past six months that I was working 
on the tools necessary to fork Boost into a C++ 11 only distro which 
also lets you use Boost libraries individually standalone without the 
rest of Boost.

I have got a first alpha version of my clang AST based local bindings 
generator working, and you can see it at 
https://github.com/ned14/local-bind-cpp-library. This tool lets you 
generate a set of local namespace bindings for some implementation of 
some library such that your library implementation code need not care 
what the underlying implementation of dependent library facilities 
is. This way your Boost library could be using either Boost or the 
C++ 11 STL and you don't need to care (most of the time).

Now I have the first alpha version working and generating a 
reasonable set of C++ 11 STL bindings 
(https://github.com/ned14/local-bind-cpp-library/tree/master/include/s
tl11), I'll start with porting over my own Boost libraries to it, so 
Spinlock, Expected, non-allocating future-promise and AFIO will be 
the first, and with those AFIO should become capable of being 
completely standalone from Boost whilst still also able to compile 
against Boost.

After that I'll try porting the entire of Boost.Thread over such that 
Boost.Thread no longer needs Boost. I think that would be hugely 
useful for people wanting to use potential C++ 17 threading 
functionality without needing to draw in all of Boost as a 
dependency, and that might greatly widen the empirical experience new 
threading facilities might get before the 17 standard.

Once I've succeeded with that, if the present situation with Boost 
has not improved by then, I'll press ahead with a new Boost distro 
website which score ranks Boost modules according to the scoring 
manifest I outlined on this list some months ago, and lets you 
download standalone Boost distros of your choice. Obviously only 
libraries ported to be standalone capable would be available, so I 
would hope that if I can demonstrate an easy port with Boost.Thread, 
others may follow with their libraries.

All this work occurs in my free time of a few hours per week, so 
progress will be slow but steady. Comments on the local namespace 
binding tool are welcome. Comments on the proposed C++11/14 good 
practice idiom of binding dependent library APIs into the local 
namespace are also welcome, because as far as I can tell no one here 
has discussed a formal set of conventions to make best use of inline 
namespaces for new libraries. I'll put it another way - local 
namespace binds are a poor man's version of Herb's proposed C++ ABI 
facility. As much as they aren't quite as good, they are probably 
good enough (relative to Herb's most recent proposal).

Niall

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