Re: [boost] [endian] Request for comments

Subject: Re: [boost] [endian] Request for comments
From: Michael Caisse (mcaisse-lists_at_[hidden])
Date: 2019-04-28 05:44:39

On 4/27/19 10:18, Peter Dimov via Boost wrote:
> There are two things that I suspect need to be fixed in Boost.Endian,
> but the changes are breaking.
> 
> 1. endian_arithmetic<...> derives publicly from endian_buffer<...>.
> Intuitively, this inheritance relationship doesn't seem right, and it
> prevents endian_arithmetic from being a C++03 POD, due to having a base
> class.
> 
> 2. the data() member function returns char const*. This type is strongly
> associated with null-terminated strings, and as such, using it for the
> underlying bytes of the endian object seems error-prone. I'd much prefer
> to return `unsigned char const*` from data() (although in C++17
> `std::byte const*` might be even better.)
> 
> I can't however estimate with any certainty whether the (mostly
> aesthetic) benefit of these changes would outweigh the users' annoyance
> from their code being broken for no strong reason.
> 
> Comments?
> 

I'm personally not a fan of breaking code without reason. I'm also a fan
of progress and not stopping libraries from progressing. If we wanted
stale libraries that aren't allowed to improve we would just use the
stuff in std.

As a user of the library I don't have a strong opinion either way ...
which is like saying, do what makes you happy as the maintainer  (o;

It is interesting that these didn't come up in the review (or at least I
am assuming they didn't. I looked over the mini-review discussion and
didn't see anything).

-- 
Michael Caisse
Ciere Consulting
ciere.com