Re: [boost] Road to low-quality-code is paved with good intentions of dropping dependencies

Subject: Re: [boost] Road to low-quality-code is paved with good intentions of dropping dependencies
From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-01-07 10:22:53

On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 8:33 AM, Ion Gaztañaga <igaztanaga_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> El 07/01/2015 a las 10:49, Antony Polukhin escribió:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've been looking through the latest changes to drop dependencies. Stuff
>> that I saw is very frightening.
>>
>> For example:
>>
>> https://github.com/boostorg/move/blob/develop/include/boost/move/detail/type_traits.hpp
>> . Every boost release some issues are fixed in intrinsics of TypeTraits
>> and
>> is_move_* is_nothrow_* traits. Copy-pasting code from TypeTraits feels
>> like
>> loading a gun and pointing it on own foot.
>
>
> I really don't agree. I've measured the code bloat that TypeTraits and other
> "low-level" libraries were bringing to some libraries and it was very
> noticeable. I would like to depend only on TypeTraits but that's impossible,
> it brings MPL, Preprocessor, etc. Including boost/container/vector.hpp was
> bringing MB of preprocessed lines, comparing it to 200KB of preprocessed
> code for <vector> and several users were complaining about compilation
> times. Compilation times have improved with the dependency removal. I've
> contributed a little bit to Boost.TypeTraits and I'd like to use it, but
> only if we can make Boost.TypeTraits depend only on Config/Predef.

For all the type traits that are now supported by the standard library
in use, it might be nice if #include
<boost/type_traits/std/some_trait.hpp> brought in the standard library
version. So eventually the many boost libraries that use only type
traits that have been standardized would have no dependencies on the
actual boost implementations.

--Beman