Re: A question for folks here

From: Alexander Grund (alexander.grund_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-07-12 14:14:30

Am 10.07.24 um 16:47 schrieb David Sankel via Boost:
> For those who got involved in Boost within the last couple years, how did
> you hear about boost? What attracted you to it?
Boost was used at the place I worked at when I was a student.
I quickly came to love the idea of RAII which was implemented in Boost 
(mainly smart pointers combined with Boost.Move).
C++11 was just around the corner with experimental support by a few 
compilers but I had to stick to C++98 for work.
Boost.Move and generally many Boost constructs provided many benefits of 
C++11 in C++98.
Digging through the headers (source code is the best documentation ;-) ) 
also helped to improve my C++-fu.

Later I discovered an intricate bug in Boost.Serialization which 
severely affected a work project.
Finding what went wrong and why, how to reproduce and fix it was quite a 
fun challenge (multiple shared objects).

Next I introduced Boost and especially Boost.Locale for UTF8-support of 
(especially) paths on Windows in other projects.
By that I found the not-yet-Boost library Nowide and used the 
"standalone" version of it.
Later I pushed to finally include it in Boost and became a maintainer of 
that and later Boost.Locale.
This was also in wake of "Boost is so huge" arguments which I could 
counter with "all we need is in Boost already".
So I loved to see Boost as a complementary standard library especially 
until broad support of C++11.

Learning quickly that "untested code is broken" I did a lot of work on 
CI also in the context of Boost.

What kept me here is the continuous learning opportunity by conversing 
with the other Boost developers.

Alex

PS: Also not affiliated with the C++ Alliance