[container] Draft development plan for Boost.Container

From: Ion Gaztañaga (igaztanaga_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-05-21 05:03:37

Hi to all,

Boost.Container was accepted in 2011 when container classes were spun 
off from Boost.Interprocess to form a new library. At that time it 
offered new features like emulated move semantics for "classic" STL-like 
containers and some new classes like flat_map and stable_vector.

During these years more containers/main features were added:

- The scoped allocator Model was added in Boost 1.50 (2012)
- static_vector was added in Boost 1.54 (2013)
- small_vector was added in Boost 1.58 (2015)
- Polymorphic Memory Resources were added in Boost 1.60 (2015)
- devector was added in Boost 1.75 (2020)

Lately I've been collecting some ideas about how to improve the library 
and keep it interesting/useful both for other Boost libraries and Boost 
users.

I've somewhat formalized a bit some of those ideas and I'd like to share 
them here in order to obtain feedback from the developers. Here's the 
document:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VdMTheFUczC946dP3VKPseOoUq3sVKjU73oMvK8FE3o/edit?usp=sharing

Note that this document does not outline a schedule for all those ideas, 
it's an initial description of possible developments that should be 
evaluated/prioritized, as developing a substantial subset of the 
proposals would be a huge task.

Thanks in advance for your attention and comments.

Best,

Ion