Re: Future of C++ and Boost

From: Kostas Savvidis (kotika98_at_[hidden])
Date: 2022-05-05 14:26:23

> On Apr 25, 2022, at 18:40, William Linkmeyer via Boost <boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> 
> What is the simplest, most relevant library or feature — or library improvement — that C++ or Boost is missing?
> 

There might be many nice things to have.

But, I would argue that what Boost needs is a trimming and deprecation of ancient stuff. There are a million reasons why
this cannot be done tomorrow, but if we are talking about a roadmap for 20 and 50 years then it might be a good time to think about it. First and foremost, adopt a timeframe now to get rid of stuff that has been later implemented in the standard library. I do not accept that the standard library is not good enough, as has been heard also in this thread, if that is indeed the conclusion then it's indeed time to get together for a beer, cry and hug, and switch to Python.

Second, that such and such library will be deprecated by 2030 - and threaten that other libraries will de deprecated if they cannot get rid of the dependency (mpl!).
 
In other words, boost needs to shrink not grow. Maybe someone should make a boost-lite with no ancient dependencies and weighting 10MB max? I conjecture that it would do magic to adoption by smaller sized projects.

Cheers,
Kostas