[boost] [poly_collection] Small review

Subject: [boost] [poly_collection] Small review
From: Pete Bartlett (pete_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-05-09 10:20:40

> 
> Dear Ion, Joaquin and boost mailing list,
>  
> I hope this brief review is of some value to you. I don’t expect to be a recognised name on the mailing list but have contributed to it intermittently over the years. I have also used the author’s MultiIndex library in production for about a decade. 
>  
> I would recommend that PolyCollection be accepted into Boost.
>  
> I think the design pattern is common enough to be Boost-ified. I have done something very similar to boost::base_collection myself in the past and have achieved useful speed ups over a solution like boost::ptr_vector in a production system. My speed-ups were not quite as good as Joaquin documents, but I can’t tell if this was due to the ineptitude of my own solution or due to lab conditions of the Boost.PolyCollection tests.
>  
> I spent a couple of hours reading the docs and running basic examples on my default compiler (VS2015 x64) and did not experience any significant problems.
>  
> It may be worth remarking in the docs (sorry if I missed it) what facilities are used for the type registries that are presumably behind the scenes. From the reference section I think RTTI is required. Is this a hard limit or could Boost.TypeIndex be used?
>  
> NB the reference section has a note “REVIEW THIS DESIGN DECISION” in it.
>  
> Personally I would attach value to the fact that the author has been a great servant to Boost over the years (as have  many others) so it is likely that this would be a well-maintained library. E.g. if algorithms were added to <algorithm> in the future, they would likely end up in <boost/poly_collection/algorithm.hpp> too.
>  
> Regards,
> Pete
>