March 2006 - Boost - lists.boost.org

[1.34] Branch for release
by Thomas Witt 10 Apr '06

10 Apr '06

Hi, unless there are major issues I'd like to branch for release by the end of this week. Please let me know of any outstanding issues that should be resolved prior to branching. Thomas -- Thomas Witt witt(a)acm.org

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asio review results -- asio accepted
by Jeff Garland 10 Apr '06

10 Apr '06

All - I'm pleased to announce that asio has been accepted into Boost. As usual with a Boost review, the asio review generated plenty of discussion, issues, and controversy. Comments ranged from high praise, including success stories of projects in production, to serious design concerns and issues. On balance, in my judgment, asio provides a generally solid library that is ready for inclusion into the Boost library -- providing key functionality in an area that developers have a strong need. Of course, like anything else, asio is not perfect -- a number of key issues were uncovered during the review. In terms of required changes I'm only going to cite a few: - Fixes to dynamic memory allocation issues - Interface changes to support ipv4 and ipv6 seamlessly at runtime - Improvements to support strongly typed socket interfaces Chris has communicated a couple possible solutions to the memory allocation issue and I'll ask that the interface and other changes for this issue continue to be discussed on the Boost list so consensus can be achieved on the best resolution. Other key improvements that should be explored as future enhancements include: - Possible removal of some of the c-style interfaces - Exploration of higher level iostream integrations - Performance improvements - Improved documentation (wouldn't be Boost w/o this one) Chris has a much longer list of changes garnered from the review and is well on his way to addressing many of them. Note that there were several threads and discussions about performance, which is particularly critical for the domain covered by asio. One of the performance issues is the dynamic memory allocation issue cited above. In general, the reviewers have extremely high expectations here. However, after reviewing the discussion and library it's my belief that many developers will find asio performance sufficient to build significant projects with only the memory allocation changes. I expect Chris will be able to address some of the other performance issues cited by reviewers in asio over time. Once again I'll apologize to the Boost community for the delay in the review results. The delay was entirely due to my own personal scheduling issues and should not reflect on asio in any way. Thanks again to all the reviewers for their effort and especially to Chris for his tremendous effort in bringing asio to Boost! Jeff

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Ann: Statistics/Special Functions/Numeric Methods Toolkit
by John Maddock 06 Apr '06

06 Apr '06

Gentlemen, This is to announce a new library added to the file vault, it is a work in progress and is intended to fulfil two needs: 1) To provide a small number of high quality special functions, initially these will be concentrated on functions used in statistical applications (with a strong nod towards Paul Bristow's existing work in this area). The functions currently implemented are the gamma/beta/erf functions along with the incomplete gamma and beta functions (four variants of each). All the implementations are fully generic and support the use of arbitrary "real-number" types, although they are optimised for use with types with known-about mantissa sizes: typically float, double or long double. Use of these functions with interval arithmetic (Boost.Interval) isn't quite supported yet, but it's something I want to investigate soon. 2) To provide at least some of the tools required to implement mathematical special functions, hopefully the presence of these will encourage other authors to contribute more special function implementations in the future. Currently implemented are helpers for the evaluation of infinite series, continued fractions and rational approximations. There are also classes for the manipulation of polynomials, for testing a special function against tabulated test data, and for the rapid generation of test data and/or data for output to an external graphing application. I've been keeping deliberately quiet about this for a while (with apologies to Paul Bristow), as I wanted to be certain that these special function implementations would offer something over and above what is available elsewhere. I still have some way to go here: erf and lgamma in particular still need work, but the incomplete gamma and beta functions already typically have 10 times lower error bounds than Cephes and GSL, and in one spectacular case 10^11 times more accurate (which is to say there is a domain of the incomplete gamma where Cephes and GSL have hardly any significant digits correct). Preliminary documentation is available here: http://www.johnmaddock.co.uk/toolkit and includes quite a lot of information already, including descriptions of implementation methodologies etc. There's also a roadmap of future work, open issues, and what needs to be done before a final release etc: http://www.johnmaddock.co.uk/toolkit/libs/math/doc/html/math_toolkit/status… The actual source code, is available for download in the vault: http://boost-consulting.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=ma… Regards, John Maddock.

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[tuples] const_tie
by Yuval Ronen 05 Apr '06

05 Apr '06

Hi. In the tuples library there is a function that creates a tuple with auto deduction of types - make_tuple(), and there's also a function that creates a tuple with reference of auto deduction of types - tie(), but there's no function that does the same with const reference. I found that such a function is useful when I have a simple struct with simple members, and I want comparision operators to it. Instead of writing these operators myself, I'd like to use tuples' code that does it. To ease this task (IOW, to save me specifying the tuple type explicitly) a const_tie would be most useful. my code would then look like: #define MY_STRUCT_AS_TUPLE(obj) const_tie(obj.x, obj.y, obj.z) bool operator<(const MyStruct &lhs, const MyStruct &rhs) { return MY_STRUCT_AS_TUPLE(lhs) < MY_STRUCT_AS_TUPLE(rhs); } which is the best I can think of (with typeof I could also turn the macro to a template function). I know I can accomplish the same with make_tuple() and cref(), but this way I can avoid the repetitive cref() calls. Can this be added? Thanks, Yuval

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MSVC doesn't like some high-ASCII characters on non-US systems
by Foster Brereton 05 Apr '06

05 Apr '06

All, We are getting warnings when trying to compile Boost source files with MSVC 2003 and 2005 when there are high-ASCII characters in the sources. The reported problem only shows up when the computer's region is set to Japanese, but there could be other affected regions as well. A viable workaround is changing the setting for non-Unicode programs in the Control Panel/Regional and Language Options from Japanese to English (United States), but this is very inconvenient for members of our staff whose native region is Japanese. One (abridged) example of the warning we get from MSVC is: While compiling boost\type_traits\is_base_and_derived.hpp: warning C4819: The file contains a character that cannot be represented in the current code page (932). Save the file in Unicode format to prevent data loss. A caveat to this problem is that the warning shows up when there are high-ASCII characters in comments, so all copyright symbols and high-ASCII characters used in names have the potential to generate these compilation warnings for us. Another caveat to this problem is not all high-ASCII characters produce this problem. My guess is that some of the high-ASCII characters have a valid code page translation (e.g., the copyright symbol), and so the warning is not emitted. An implication of this would be that some characters will work for some OS regions and not for others, resulting in a varied set of errors based on the region one has chosen. The reason this is a problem is because our projects have warnings-as-errors turned on. We are not interested in disabling warnings-as-errors to mitigate the issue because of the far-reaching side effects of such a change. Has anyone else seen this problem? Are there other potential fixes other than removing all high-ASCII characters from the source files? Blessings, Foster -- Foster T. Brereton - Computer Scientist Software Technology Lab, Adobe Systems Incorporated fbrereto(a)adobe.com -- http://opensource.adobe.com

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Boost.Test: violation of min/max guidelines
by John Maddock 04 Apr '06

04 Apr '06

I've just been hit by Boost.Test not following the min/max coding guidelines, the patch is trivial: Index: boost/test/floating_point_comparison.hpp =================================================================== RCS file: /cvsroot/boost/boost/boost/test/floating_point_comparison.hpp,v retrieving revision 1.26 diff -r1.26 floating_point_comparison.hpp 66c66 < return std::numeric_limits<FPT>::max(); --- > return (std::numeric_limits<FPT>::max)(); Needs to be applied to the release branch as well now of course :-) Thanks, John.

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CVS problem
by Robert Ramey 03 Apr '06

03 Apr '06

For the last 24 hrs, I've been getting the following when I try to update from CVS. Is this just me or is there some general problem? Robert Ramey $ cvs update -r RC_1_34_0 cvs update: warning: unrecognized response `ssh: connect to host cvs.sourceforge ' from cvs servernection timed out cvs [update aborted]: end of file from server (consult above messages if any)

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Re: [boost] [Boost-bugs] [ boost-Bugs-1461533 ] Non-basic-source-character-set characters conflict with MSVC
by Foster Brereton 03 Apr '06

03 Apr '06

I have attached a list to this email (There are 354 in the list as of this writing). I couldn't figure out how to attach the file to the bug report after-the-fact. Note that these are the most likely candidate source files to cause an error when building the Boost sources -- some test cases and example sources were omitted. Blessings, Foster On 3/30/06, Marshall Clow <marshall(a)idio.com> wrote: > At 9:43 AM -0800 3/30/06, SourceForge.net wrote: > >Bugs item #1461533, was opened at 2006-03-30 09:43 > >Message generated for change (Tracker Item Submitted) made by Item Submitter > >You can respond by visiting: > >https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=107586&aid=1461533&group_… > > > > [ snip ] > > >Initial Comment: > >There exist high-ascii characters in the Boost sources that cannot > >be converted to the local region for a given computer because the > >context of the originating region of the source is not known. Thus, > >these high-ascii characters may not have a proper mapping, and a > >warning will be emitted by MSVC 2003 and 2005. This should be > >considered a failure case because, though low, it is still emitting > >an alert. Thus, without the correct region set on your system, the > >Boost sources fail to build. > > To whoever entered this bug (Foster? Nigel?) - please provide a list > of offending files in the bug report. > -- > -- Marshall > > Marshall Clow Idio Software <mailto:marshall@idio.com> > > It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. > It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, > the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning. > It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. > _______________________________________________ > Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost > -- Foster T. Brereton - Computer Scientist Software Technology Lab, Adobe Systems Incorporated fbrereto(a)adobe.com -- http://opensource.adobe.com

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Re: [boost] [threading] rewrite (was: Bug list status)
by Martin Bonner 03 Apr '06

03 Apr '06

----Original Message---- From: Roland Schwarz > There is a new team that will try to handle the threading library. > We are currently busy trying to do a rewrite of the library on a > separate branch. Interesting. Why do you feel it needs a rewrite? (I'm not for a moment suggesting it doesn't, I'm just curious - I know very little about boost::thread). -- Martin Bonner Martin.Bonner(a)Pitechnology.com Pi Technology, Milton Hall, Ely Road, Milton, Cambridge, CB4 6WZ, ENGLAND Tel: +44 (0)1223 203894

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Smart enum
by Tomas Puverle 01 Apr '06

01 Apr '06

Hey, Please have a look at the thread on boost.users called "safe assign of int to enum" and let me know if there is any interest here in the library I describe. (I didn't want to cross-post) Any suggestions/feature requests will be gratefully accepted. TIA, Tom

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