Re: Revitalization

From: Alexander Grund (alexander.grund_at_[hidden])
Date: 2022-12-06 10:02:30

Am 06.12.22 um 03:36 schrieb Proton via Boost:
> I concur with the streamlining of Boost to avoid the monolith. ~18 
> months ago Math offered its first standalone release which was made 
> possible by jumping to C++11. [...] I am willing to assist other 
> maintainers in offering a standalone module of their libraries.
When I took over maintaining Boost.Nowide (actually when I pushed for 
finally including it in Boost) there already was a standalone version.
I wrote CD scripts (Github Actions) to create the standalone version 
from each commit pushed to the develop branch and the standalone version 
is tested together with the "Boost version".

This was requested by users and I got reports it is (still) used. It 
also was greatly simplified by requiring C++11 as the minimum.

However I agree that Boost.Config is an important foundation and the 
only thing I'm missing for the standalone version (I had to duplicate 2 
macros from Boost.Config in the standalone)

This serves as a datapoint that having a subset of libraries available 
makes sense.
I actually like the CMake integration, i.e. the CMakeLists.txt many 
Boost libraries already have because CMake requires to specify the 
(direct) dependencies (even header-only ones) explicitly.
This makes it much easier to see what is required. Although the 
transitive dependencies are still an issue (for users having only 
download a part of Boost)

 > At a first glance, the following libraries would have to justify 
their continued existence as "core" Boost libraries:
 > Thread (superseded by std::thread)

Actually the std library support for std::thread on Windows at least is 
still lacking. IIRC it was the MinGW cross-compiler with which we (in 
another project) were unable to use std::thread for Windows and had to 
resort to Boost.Thread.
So I'd argue this is a point for keeping it in "core" Boost.

Alex