Re: [boost] [Hana] Formal review

Subject: Re: [boost] [Hana] Formal review
From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-06-18 06:15:45

On 17 Jun 2015 at 21:59, David Sankel wrote:

> That's a bit of a strawman, but yes I'd like to review core hanna (which is
> mostly what is used in the examples) and then review major libraries built
> on hanna (such as the Haskell typeclass stack that is currently included).

That's a fair point. Are you proposing a Hana core and a Hana 
applications split?

I see particular value in this if a Hana core library can become MSVC 
compatible much sooner than a Hana applications library. For me, the 
lack of MSVC support - even with winclang getting ever closer to 
replacing MSVC - is a showstopper to me using Hana at all in my own 
code. And from last month onwards I stopped supporting VS2013 in my 
new code, so I'm hardly being backwards.

There is precedent for a library not supporting MSVC initially on 
entering Boost with support being added later, though if I remember 
correctly it hasn't been common since VS2003 which was the first MSVC 
with partial template specialisation.

> The boost home page does not state that boost libraries "are intended
> to *eventually
> *be widely useful, and usable across a broad spectrum of applications".
> It's a subtle, but big difference. One sentence is attractive to the
> majority of companies who make real software, and the other is not.
> 
> C++, more or less, is a language for engineers who make multi-platform,
> large-scale, high-performance, long-lived applications and libraries. I
> like that Boost has been a library collection for these folks and hope it
> stays that way.

Also a fair point. However, probably a majority of Boost users are on 
toolsets at least a decade old, and won't be able to even conduct 
feasibility studies of C++ 11 libraries for years more yet.

If you leave the Boost ecosystem things diverge, some users are on 
bleeding edge clang only C++, others on a pre-98 C++ level. I'd say 
there are a lot more of the latter especially in games and embedded 
systems than the former.

Niall

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