Re: Boost, not LEWG

From: Zach Laine (whatwasthataddress_at_[hidden])
Date: 2020-06-28 03:00:27

On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 6:12 PM Vinnie Falco via Boost
<boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 3:46 PM Jeff Garland via Boost
> <boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> >  Ideally what Zach proposes will ship under the
> > Boost banner first.  Why?   So more than the maybe 20 people on the
> > committee will look at it before the ink is dried and it ships with
> > compilers.
>
> It sounds like the committee's workflow is defective. If more people
> should interact with the library before it goes into the standard,
> here's a novel idea:
>
>     Don't put it in the standard yet.

That may be the right answer, but complaining about it won't fix it.
The reality is that people are going to put stuff into the standard
library.  The question then is not whether or not they should, but
what kinds of things go in.  The answer ought to be well-tested
existing practice.  Living in Boost for a while gives us the most
consistently good shot at that (you could just put stuff up on Github
and still get a lot of users, but that happens less often).  That's
why I think we should promote the use of Boost as a viable path to a
proposal.

> Why does Boost.Text have to go into the standard right away? Why can't
> it enjoy life as its own non-std library for a few years, the way that
> Asio did? Plenty of users and companies can enjoy the Unicode library
> without it having to be in the std:: namespace.

It doesn't need to, for most definitions of "need".  No one will die
if it doesn't.  No empires will fall.  However, C and C++ are the only
widely used production languages that do not have standard library
support for Unicode text processing.  I consider this embarrassing.
The existence of a Boost version makes things better, to be sure.
However, Boost is not ubiquitous, whereas the standard library is.

Zach