Interest in updated, standalone iterator_facade library?

From: Zach Laine (whatwasthataddress_at_[hidden])
Date: 2019-08-11 02:20:40

I write a lot of iterators, and I'm getting sick of doing it by hand.  I
can't use Boost.Iterator's iterator_facade in library code, since it knows
nothing about constexpr and noexcept.

The design of Boost.Iterator's iterator_facade does not lend itself very
well to being modified in a direction that is standardization-friendly
(reasons why are outlined in the online docs).

So, here is one take on this problem:

GitHub:
https://github.com/tzlaine/iterator_facade

Online Docs:
https://tzlaine.github.io/iterator_facade

For those unfamiliar with the problem, iterators are very simple, at the
highest level of abstraction.  An iterator's implementation does not
reflect this -- it is highly repetitive and easy to get subtly wrong.  This
library fixes that.

The library is forward-looking, since I intend to write WG21 papers to
standardize iterator_facade; there is good support for upcoming C++20
library features.  In particular, the iterators created with
iterator_facade model the C++20 iterator concepts, and therefore do not
necessarily match the requirements of the C++17-and-earlier requirement
tables.  I have not found this to affect the usability of
iterator-facade-based iterators with pre-C++20 code.

Something to note: there was a recent-ish attempt to stanrdize
iterator_facade, which is now abandoned, P0186 (http://wg21.link/P0186).
This was very different from what I'm proposing for Boost.  I talked to
Eric Niebler about this, and he favors a return to the CRTP-based approach
of my lib and the original Boost.Iterator iterator_facade library.

Zach