January 2011 - Boost-announce

[CfP] Reminder: 5th Annual BoostCon, Aspen (CO, USA), May 15-20, 2011
by Hartmut Kaiser 30 Jan '11

30 Jan '11

Please note the extended deadline: February 10th, 2011 ------------------ Please distribute. ------------------ 5TH ANNUAL BOOST CONFERENCE 2011 Aspen CO, USA, May 15 - 20, 2011, www.boostcon.com CALL FOR PARTICIPATION We invite you to submit session proposals to the 5th Annual Boost Conference: BoostCon 2011 (Aspen CO, USA, May 15 - 20, 2011). Traditionally the main face-to-face event for all things Boost (www.boost.org) BoostCon 2011 will present leading speakers from the whole C++ community. From using the Boost libraries to writing and maintaining them, from evangelizing to deploying Boost within your organization, from infrastructure and process to vision and mission, and the new C++ Standard, BoostCon brings together the sessions, the colleagues, and the inspiration to support your work with C++ and Boost in particular for the next year. To reflect the breadth of the Boost community, the conference includes sessions aimed at three constituencies: Boost end-users, hard-core Boost library and tool developers, and academics focusing on research. The program fosters interaction and engagement within and across those groups, with an emphasis on hands-on, participatory sessions. SESSION TOPICS Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following: * General tutorial sessions introducing one or more Boost libraries * In-depth sessions on using specific Boost libraries * Case studies on using Boost * Experts panels * Advanced sessions on implementation techniques used within Boost libraries * C++0x and how it changes life for users and library writers * Development workshops to extend or enhance existing Boost libraries * Workshops on design process * Infrastructure workshops such as Build tools, Website, Testing * Concepts and Generic Programming * Hardware and infrastructure presentations focused on how libraries can make better use of the technology * Software development tools and their application to C++ and or Boost * Other topics likely to be of great interest to Boost users and developers Interactive and collaborative sessions are encouraged, as this is the nature of both the on-line Boost community and the style of learning and participation that has proven most successful at such events. Sessions can be tutorial based, with an emphasis on interaction and participant involvement, or workshop based, whether hands-on programming or paper-based, discussion-driven collaborative work. SESSION FORMATS Presentations ------------- Presentations focus on a practitioner's ideas and experience with anything relevant to Boost and Boost users. Panels ------------- Panels feature three or four people presenting their ideas and experiences relating to Boost's relevant, controversial, emerging, or unresolved issues. Panels may be conducted in several ways, such as comparative, analytic, or historic. Tutorials ------------- Tutorials are sessions at which instructors teach conference participants specific Boost-relevant skills. Workshops ------------- Workshops provide an active arena for advancements in Boost-relevant topics. Workshops provide the opportunity for experienced practitioners to develop new ideas about a topic of common interest and experience. Author's Corner Presentations ------------- These were introduced at BoostCon 2008, and were a great success. They are short (30 minute) sessions, focusing on tips on usage and design. In addition, we're looking to uncover the hidden design gems in Boost libraries. Tool Vendors Presentations ------------- We actively encourage tool vendors and ISP's to submit proposals for a special Tool Vendors Session Track aimed at products related to Boost and C++ (compilers, libraries, tools, etc.). Other formats may also be of interest. Don't hold back a proposal just because it doesn't fit into a pigeonhole. SUBMITTING A PROPOSAL Standard Sessions are 90 minutes. You may submit a proposal for fractions or multiples of 90-minutes. Fractional proposals will be grouped into 90 minute sessions covering related topics. Longer sessions, such as tutorials and classes, will be assigned 90 minute, three hour (i.e. half day), or six hour (i.e. full day) time slots. Please include: * The working title. * Type of session: presentation, panel, tutorial, workshop, authors corner, vendor track, other. * A paragraph or two describing the topic covered, suitable for the conference web site. * Proposed length: 10-20 minute short talks, 45 minutes, 90 minutes, half day, full day. * Alternate lengths, if you are willing to make adjustments: 10-20 minute short-talks, 45 minutes, 90 minutes, half-day, full day. * Audience: users, developers, both. * Level: basic, intermediate, advanced. * A biography, suitable for the conference web site. * Your contact information (will not be made public). SUBMISSION DETAILS All submissions have to be done through the EasyChair conference management system: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=boostcon2011. If you have not already registered at EasyChair, you will need to do so in order to submit your proposal. All submissions will go through a peer review process. Authors are invited (but are not required) to submit PDF versions of full papers of up to 10 pages in ACM conference proceedings format (see http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates) The full papers are not required unless you want them published in the proceedings. All accepted proposals will be made available in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library (approval pending). Best papers, after further reviews, will be considered to be book chapters or journal articles in a renowned journal. The session materials go on the BoostCon website and will be available to attendees. For general information on the BoostCon 2011 paper submission or the scope of technical papers solicited, please refer to the conference website at www.boostcon.com. For any other questions about the submission process or paper format, please contact the Program Committee at boostcon2011(a)easychair.com. If you have any technical problems with EasyChair, please contact EasyChair for help. Note: Presenters must agree to grant a non-exclusive perpetual license to publish submitted materials, either electronically or in print, in any media related to BoostCon. IMPORTANT DATES New proposal submissions due: January 10th, 2011. Proposals decisions sent (tentative program): February 17th, 2011. Fully scheduled program available: February 25th, 2011. Session materials due: April 15th, 2011. Hartmut Kaiser: hartmut.kaiser(a)gmail.com (Program Committee Chair) David Abrahams: dave(a)boostpro.com (Conference Chair) On behalf of the conference organizers

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[Review][GIL] Boost.GIL IO and Toolbox extensions have been ACCEPTED into Boost
by Mateusz Loskot 27 Jan '11

27 Jan '11

Dear All, The formal review of IO and Toolbox extensions for Boost.GIL [1] ended on December 17th, 2010 [2] The review subject was not a standalone library but a part of whole - an extension to existing Boost.GIL. The review result: ACCEPTED Number of received discussion and feedback posts is ~140. I consider most of them in-topic, significant and also insightful. Reviewers pointed issues already known from previous discussions on the mailing list as well as new topics regarding the design and implementation of the extensions. Also, issues related to the library itself (Boost.GIL) were addressed. Some of them could be considered ideas for future works and improvements. It is remarkable, most (if not all) of the discussions were focused on the IO extension. None of the submitted reviews include comments to the Toolbox extension. Formally, the review concluded with 1 NO and 7 YES votes. Some of the YES votes are considered as conditional and number of changes were requested by the reviewers. The following changes should be addressed before the extensions appear in the Boost mainstream: 1. Documentation is adequate, but requires clean-up and fixing of lots of typos. 2. Additional tests are added to exercise currently untested error cases that result in a longjmp should be added. They should pass on all platforms officially supported by Boost. 3. Make sure the test images are license-free. If the license status is unknown, change them to other license-free images. 4. The requirements for adding new file formats / backends to be made more explicit. This means defining concept for a file format reader/writer, etc. and adding new file formats would constitute providing models for these concepts. 5. Support for reading images whose file format is unknown at compile time. That involves the ability to register file formats / backends, associate them with given extensions and then call the appropriate reader based on the extension of the file name. 6. Support for different backends for the same image formats. It appears that this can be done simply the same way a file format can be extended, i.e. have "png_libpng" and "png_lodepng" tags. 7. Support for efficient reading/writing of parts of images that are too large to fit in memory. There are two ways to proceed: one is to have an input/output iterator that enforces sequential access, and another is to allow for user-driven access at the cost of sometimes severe performance. The reviewers also posted a few suggestions that could improve quality of the two extensions, 1. Name of functions like read_int8, read_int16, read_int32, write_int8 in Device models suggest they return and accept signed integers, but they return and accept unsigned integers. The naming could be improved.. 2. Do some profiling and performance optimization of the most common formats. Add some test cases to measure speed of common scenarios. 3. Make sure the test cases provide complete coverage. For example, set a breakpoint in every method, every switch statement and branch. Run your tests and remove any breakpoints that are encountered. Look at the breakpoints that were not hit and add tests for them. 4. It would be great if Christian and Domagoj could join their efforts to take the best of their libraries (IO extension implementations) to the IO extension included in Boost.GIL and collaborate for the advanced features discussed in reviews. I would like to thank Edd Dawson, Zach Laine, Domagoj Saric, Roland Bock, Lubomir Bourdev, Tom Brinkman, Phil Endecott, Kenny Riddile for reviews and others who participated in discussions. Thanks also go to Christian Henning for great work. I would like conclude recalling short comment Lubomir Bourdev included in his review. In my opinion, it is a good summary of the Boost.GIL IO and Toolbox review and generally all discussions on this subject: *** The problem with I/O is that you can never declare success. All we can hope for is push the boundary as much as we can, and leave the rest for the next update. *** [1] http://lists.boost.org/boost-announce/2010/11/0273.php [2] http://lists.boost.org/boost-announce/2010/12/0279.php Best regards, -- Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net Charter Member of OSGeo, http://osgeo.org Member of ACCU, http://accu.org

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[Review][Chrono] Boost.Chrono has been ACCEPTED into Boost
by Anthony Williams 05 Jan '11

05 Jan '11

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel as well. Hi, I am pleased to announce that Boost.Chrono has been ACCEPTED into Boost. There were a reasonable number of reviews this time, and they were unanimous that Boost.Chrono should be accepted. Boost.Chrono provides the time facilities from the upcoming C++0x standard, so is an important base library. A few changes were requested by the reviewers which should be addressed before this library appears in a Boost release. I know that Vicente has already started working on some of these. The requested changes are: * The documentation needs revising to ensure everything is documented, and it is clear which time source is used for each clock type * The use of double underscores in identifiers should be stopped --- such identifiers are reserved for the implementation. * chrono::monotonic_clock will need renaming chrono::steady_clock to match the C++0x draft * the is_monotonic member of the clock types will need renaming is_steady to match the C++0x draft * Remove operator/ for dividing by a duration * Include examples for I/O in non-English languages * Remove "#if 0" blocks * Address all the "TODO" items in the source * Check the license on the time parsing code, and reimplement if the license is incompatible Apologies to the reviewers if I've missed anything. I would like to thank Vicente for submitting the library and those that took the time to write a review. Anthony -- Author of C++ Concurrency in Action http://www.stdthread.co.uk/book/ just::thread C++0x thread library http://www.stdthread.co.uk Just Software Solutions Ltd http://www.justsoftwaresolutions.co.uk 15 Carrallack Mews, St Just, Cornwall, TR19 7UL, UK. Company No. 5478976

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