Re: The new Boost 17.0.0

From: Ville Voutilainen (ville.voutilainen_at_[hidden])
Date: 2020-11-27 11:59:51

On Fri, 27 Nov 2020 at 10:58, Antony Polukhin via Boost
<boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> ISO C++ WG21 community not willing to push prototypes into Boost. "We
> aim to establish "existing practice" and provide reference
> implementations so that Boost libraries are suitable for eventual
> standardization." - that's not really true any more.

..well.. it might end up being true for different libraries than it
was before. More below.

> == The Solution
> TL;DR: we need a C++17 fork of Boost with close to 0 dependencies
> between libraries and namespace versioning.
>
> С++17 provides many vocabulary types, feature test macro and a bunch
> of features for variadic templates. All of that allows us to drop a
> lot of weight and fix majority of popularity and usability problems.

Well, yeah. There was a long period of time during which boost was a
very significant library,
because it had multithreading and better smart pointer. Then WG21 woke
up, shipped C++11,
and *bam*, a sizeable portion of boost's attraction vanished,
especially since C++11 was rapidly
adopted all over the place.

Boost still has things that are alluring. Networking is alluring for
quite some time still. Beast is alluring.
JSON is alluring. I find it interesting that the alluring bits are now
much more high-level than they
used to be. Perhaps there's something there.