Re: [boost] [GSoC18] Astronomy Project Proposal

Subject: Re: [boost] [GSoC18] Astronomy Project Proposal
From: Tom Westerhout (kot.tom97_at_[hidden])
Date: 2018-03-18 15:22:35

Pranam, I've read your proposal and I think it's lacking a motivation section. Let's suppose I'm comfortable with C++. From the topics you've chosen it seems that your library is an astrometry library rather than an astronomy one. This is _very_ specific, I would even say too specific for Boost, but suppose for now that I am interested in these topics. You plan to plot curves. My question is then how are you going to implement that? There is currently no GUI library in Boost (there was a discussion not too long ago, but AFAIK it resulted in "nothing"). Are you going to depend on external libraries? I'm afraid a pretty big part of Boost community will be against that. Moving on to FITS... there are a few libraries out there which provide the functionality you describe, so what are the advantages of using your implementation? And finally, coordinate systems. Do you really need a new library for that? I mean we have Boost.Geometry, why can't celestial coordinate system just be added to it?

Don't get me wrong though, I'm not trying to discourage you. I'm just a concerned physicist :)

Tom