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: Michael Caisse (mcaisse-lists_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-01-07 14:53:59

On 01/07/2015 11:40 AM, Peter Dimov wrote:
> Michael Caisse wrote:
>> This worries me. I have had mixed results with type traits
>> specifically and the behaviour of the Boost flavour versus the std
>> flavour from various vendors. I don't recall the specifics right now
>> except to recall that the std::is_pod in MSVC produced different
>> results than gcc and Boost.
> 
> Our practice has generally been to not use the std version of something
> if it fails our tests, although there's always the possibility that your
> code happens to not be covered by our test suite.
> 

Yes, I understand that. We discussed this practice in May when the
steering committee met and so I was bringing it up again partially as a
reminder.

I find the practice very surprising as a user and would prefer that it
was controlled by a preprocessor flag and not done automagically. We
might be all excited about std versions of things but at the end of the
day 1. we don't control them, and 2. they are not the Boost
implementation and may have different behaviour (performance, results,
side affects ...).

The subject came up as we were discussing this general practice and what
to do with C++11 std libraries that overlap Boost. I'm somewhat opposed
to the TR1 type thing we did where we automagically swap out
implementations with the vendor version. I'm not opposed to using the
vendor version but I think we need to provide control so that when
something breaks for the user they can move back to the Boost version.

michael

-- 
Michael Caisse
ciere consulting
ciere.com