Re: [boost] Boost is supposed to serve *the entire C++ community; it isn't Boost's goal to serve Boost's community*

Subject: Re: [boost] Boost is supposed to serve *the entire C++ community; it isn't Boost's goal to serve Boost's community*
From: M.A. van den Berg (thijs_at_[hidden])
Date: 2016-05-22 04:32:37

> On 21 May 2016, at 23:38, Vinnie Falco <vinnie.falco_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, May 21, 2016 at 5:25 PM, Robert Ramey <ramey_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>> On 5/21/16 1:20 PM, M.A. van den Berg wrote:
>>> How can we speed of the review process, make it more efficient?
>> 
>> One can go there download or checkout the submission, try it on his machine.
>> And fill out a form which corresponds to the Boost Review process.  The
>> library author - or anyone else is informed of this and can respond. All
>> this can be done before there is any formal review announced.
> 
> Just to expand on this, here's a library that is sitting in the
> incubator (disclaimer: I am the author):
> https://github.com/vinniefalco/Beast
> 
> It offers implementations of HTTP/1 and WebSocket using Boost.Asio.
> 
> If someone were to download and try out this library and offer some
> feedback, I'm sure the author would be thrilled since acting on
> feedback can only increase the likelihood of boost acceptance.
> 

That would be a good idea indeed.

I’ve looked at the repository and I like the good number of examples, it would allow me to get started quickly. It also looks matures, the examples show a wide variety of use cases.

Finding actual users -a chicken and egg problem- would be a better review than me. I think I’m unfit to review this for three reasons: 
* I can’t think of a *real-world* use case that makes me have to go beyond simply checking if one of the example compiles (which I’m sure it will, but which won’t reveal the usability).
* I haven’t used ASIO since 1.36. I end up switching to different languages for network programming, mainly Python, node.js. I do quite a bit of backend web development but I doesn’t require me to switch to C++
* without having to dig in deep I would probably fail to spot little issues like const correctness, forwarding, copying, references, thread safety. Those things will come to light when something is not working as expecting in a complicated use case.

Maybe authors can find real-world users by going through git, look for potential library users? Find C++11 apps that embed a http server or client, fork it and build a boost dependent variant, talk to authors?