Re: Have we become too Intel x64 centered?

From: Alexander Grund (alexander.grund_at_[hidden])
Date: 2021-01-27 08:48:33

>> Meanwhile other libraries like Boost.Serialization (and consumers of 
>> same) also make their own assumptions about things like endianness 
>> and type structure, which may not matter too much in isolation but 
>> becomes very important if you're intending to use it as a portable 
>> network or disk format.
>
> I think then it is important for the libraries in which some of the 
> code is tailored to a platform/architecture to test on other 
> platform/architectures than Intel, but for the large number of Boost 
> libraries which have no direct dependencies on a platform/architecture 
> I do not see that it is of much importance. Simply because library XXX 
> uses Boost.SmartPtr does not mean that testing on ARM is going to show 
> anything of use for library XXX, which testing Boost.SmartPtr on ARM 
> would not itself show. 

Fully agree with the first point, as usual: Every branch needs to/should 
be tested.

However usually bugs show up in complex scenarios, so testing the 
downstream lib might show up bugs which the author/maintainer of the 
lower-level lib didn't think about. So there is still worth in testing 
that. Weekly is likely enough to not burn to many resources.

However the question still is: How/where can those (low level) libs be 
tested on other hardware? Travis is basically dead for us and setting up 
CI is hard (see prior discussion), so testing Boost as a whole on many 
archs, OSes, ... might still be the easiest solution as it means a 
single setup to be maintained (see the integration tester approach, 
which I'd say needs some love)

Alex