Re: What is this "Beman Project Development"?

From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-05-10 15:49:02

On 10/05/2024 16:26, Peter Dimov via Boost wrote:
> Niall Douglas wrote:
>> Myself and Boost have had a confrontational relationship in the past, but in
>> my opinion (you and other will disagree), y'all after arguing heavily with me at
>> the time then a few years later went ahead and quietly implemented almost
>> everything I suggested. So I'm good with Boost at the present time - I spoke,
>> you listened, you eventually implemented much of it. Rock on!
> 
> I have to admit that I can't at the moment think of any feature about which
> I argued with you when you proposed it, and then went ahead and quietly
> implemented later.

You've done lots of stuff yourself personally, but so have most of the 
rest of the core Boost maintainers. Stuff I suggested back 2012-2015. 
Stuff which didn't win me much love here at the time.

The biggest two of my early suggestions that you (as a group) have since 
implemented I was most appreciating recently are the cmake build support 
and the much, much better dependency and isolation graph between bits of 
Boost. Recently I hacked out Boost.Context, stripped it of the bits I 
didn't need, reused the cmake you wrote for it, and voila standalone 
reusable component. Took me minutes, not hours or days.

**Yay** Boost.

This isn't an isolated case. Last dayjob we had a fork of Boost with all 
the symbols changed so it wouldn't clash with Boost. Generating that 
fork became ever increasingly easier over time as you and the other core 
Boost maintainers kept fixing and improving stuff. All very small, 
tedious, boring little stuff. But it really adds up over time, makes a 
very big difference.

**Yay** Boost.

> It's also true that system::result is very similar to outcome::result (and
> std::expected), but I don't think I argued with you about having that, either.
> 
> I'm perfectly willing to concede that you were there first. It's the arguing
> against part that I have no recollection of.

All that came much later, and to be fair, the std::error design wasn't 
my own, it was derived from a group of people on SG14. Which you then 
iterated upon for Boost.System.

Which is exactly how software engineering excellence is achieved. Always 
grab the best bits from anything you see. Yay Boost.

Niall