Re: Boost.Beast state of play

From: Mathias Gaunard (mathias.gaunard_at_[hidden])
Date: 2020-07-02 20:36:37

On Thu, 2 Jul 2020, 17:01 Vinnie Falco, <vinnie.falco_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 8:45 AM Mathias Gaunard via Boost
> <boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> > I don't think those changes should be rushed.
> > If Boost.Asio is causing breakage across other Boost libraries, then
> > the best thing to do is to delay the Boost.Asio changes.
>
> For political reasons related to wg21 it is very important that Beast
> support these changes in THIS release. It will be of great value in
> helping to ensure that the design of Networking TS is tinkered with
> only a little bit in LEWG's hands rather than a lot (although anything
> can happen). The literal future of C++ networking is at stake.
>

I personally don't understand why people care about the C++ standard
library at all, functionality can just as easily (if not more easily) be
imported from third party libraries, and I'd rather trust a third party
library written by a domain expert than a standard implementation written
by a "language" expert.

Also the quality of Boost is so variable -- some libraries are quite low
quality and unmaintained -- that being part of Boost shouldn't be much of
an argument to LEWG.

Finally Asio being touted as the future of C++ networking when it's an old
and established paradigm, possibly already behind as far as bleeding edge
tech is concerned, might also suggest you're giving too much credit to the
influence of the C++ standard library.
I don't think standard Asio is going to change how anybody writes code.

For those reasons I think C++ developers would be best served by delivering
a quality and stable library in Boost than by trying to get stuff ready in
time to appeal to a committee.

That being said, from the rest of the replies it looks like you might be
able to reconcile the two, so it's alright.