Re: [OpenMethod] review starts on 28th of April

From: Klemens Morgenstern (klemensdavidmorgenstern_at_[hidden])
Date: 2025-04-28 16:35:11

On Sun, Apr 27, 2025 at 9:15 PM Дмитрий Архипов via Boost <
boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> Dear Boost community. The peer review of the proposed Boost.OpenMethod will
> start on 28th of April and continue until May 7th. OpenMethods implements
> open
> methods in C++. Those are "virtual functions" defined outside of classes.
> They
> allow avoiding god classes, and visitors and provide a solution to the
> Expression Problem, and the banana-gorilla-jungle problem. They also
> support
> multiple dispatch. This library implements most of Stroustrup's
> multimethods
> proposal, with some new features, like customization points and
> inter-operability with smart pointers. And despite all that open-method
> calls
> are fast - on par with native virtual functions.
>
> You can find the source code of the library at
> https://github.com/jll63/Boost.OpenMethod/tree/master and read the
> documentation at https://jll63.github.io/Boost.OpenMethod/. The library is
> header-only and thus it is fairly easy to try it out. In addition,
> Christian
> Mazakas (of the C++ Alliance) has added the candidate library to his vcpkg
> repository (https://github.com/cmazakas/vcpkg-registry-test). The library
> is
> also available in Compiler Explorer under the name YOMM2.
>

I got a few questions for the author:

1. How does a registrar work?
2. What kind of hashing are we doing?
3. "When an error is encountered, the program is terminated by a call to abort"
what errors are there? Just pure virtual?
4. Why do we need multiple policies and facets in a single project? Why
couldn't we use a single one (at least for policies) project-wide?
5. Do you have any real-world use-cases?  I looked at the ast.cpp example,
but was a bit disappointed that it was a single argument method.

Thanks,

Klemens