Re: Boost vs Std library features (was: Re: [scope] Scope review starts on November 26th)

From: Jeff Garland (azswdude_at_[hidden])
Date: 2023-11-29 01:07:16

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 1:36 PM Niall Douglas via Boost <
boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> On 28/11/2023 18:41, Andrzej Krzemienski via Boost wrote:
>
> >> Users vastly prefer even the "defective" std components over the
> >> theoretically-better boost components, simply by virtue of them being
> >> in the standard, with all of the benefits this brings. Education,
> >> documentation, ubiquity, and so on, for std components is orders of
> >> magnitude more robust than the boost equivalent. This more than makes
> >> up for any perceived deficiencies. Like it or not, vocabulary types
> >> and algorithms which make it into std are going to have an enormous
> >> advantage over any third party code.
>
> I think the pendulum may swing back in the next few years.
> ...
>
> I think that as WG21's increasing dysfunction at standardising library
> becomes more obvious to the C++ ecosystem, the need for fixed standard
> library facilities will grow because the standardised ones will become
> toxic to use in newly written code. I think Boost is as good as anywhere
> to be the natural source for fixed standardised library facilities.

Say what you want but Boost has lost that role, which is part of the
dysfunction at WG21.  If you're a committee member and you're trying to
evaluate libraries you're getting what -- godbolt links to
implementations?  How much user experience or unit testing is there? Can
you realistically see how library components work together? No, obviously.

> So
> **PLEASE** Boost keep doing what it's doing, keep standardising
> standardised library facilities, because you're a hell of a lot better
> at it than WG21 in my opinion.
>

We still do a bit of that, but mostly not because most proposals simply
bypass boost at this point. This includes proposals from major past
contributors.  I'll be making proposals in the future to change Boost, but
suffice to say just doing what we're doing won't cut it.  And there's still
a lot of WG21 here, btw -- Boost was started by WG21 members to fix WG21
libraries -- and many of us still do our best to do both.

Jeff