March 2006 - Boost - lists.boost.org

Review Wizard Report - April 2006
by Tom Brinkman 01 Apr '06

01 Apr '06

============================================ Review Wizard Status Report for April 2006 ============================================ News ==== April 1, 2006 -- The "Promotion Traits" Review Begins (Fast-Track) Proposal to add promote, integral_promotion and floating_point_promotion class templates to type_traits library. April 6, 2006 -- The "Function Types" Review Begins (Fast-Track) This library provides a metaprogramming facility to classify, decompose and synthesize function-, function pointer-, function reference- and member function pointer types. March 22, 2006 -- Asio Accepted Announcement: http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2006/03/102287.php February 17, 2006 - Shared Memory Library Accepted Announcement: http://lists.boost.org/boost-announce/2006/02/0083.php February 5, 2006 - Fixed String Library Rejected Announcement: http://lists.boost.org/boost-announce/2006/02/0081.php We need experienced review managers. Please take a look at the list of libraries in need of managers and check out their descriptions. If you can serve as review manager for any of them, email Ron Garcia or Tom Brinkman "garcia at cs dot indiana dot edu" and "reportbase at gmail dot com" respectively. A link to this report will be posted to www.boost.org. If you would like us to make any modifications or additions to this report before we do that, please email Ron or Tom. If you're library author and plan on submitting a library for review in the next 3-6 months, send Ron or Tom a short description of your library and we'll add it to the Libraries Under Construction below. We know that there are many libaries that are near completion, but we have hard time keeping track all of them. Please keep us informed about your progress. Review Queue ============ * Promotion Traits April 1, 2006 (fast-track) * Function Types April 6, 2006 (fast-track) (Not in any particular order) * Fusion * Pimpl Pointer * Property Tree * Physical Quantities System * Intrusive Containers -------------------- Function Types (mini-re-review) ------------------------------- :Author: Tobias Schwinger :Review Manager: Tom Brinkman :Download: http://boost-sandbox.sourceforge.net/vault/ :Description: This library provides a metaprogramming facility to classify, decompose and synthesize function-, function pointer-, function reference- and member function pointer types. For the purpose of this documentation, these types are collectively referred to as function types (this differs from the standard definition and redefines the term from a programmer's perspective to refer to the most common types that involve functions). The classes introduced by this library shall conform to the concepts of the Boost Metaprogramming library (MPL). The Function Types library enables the user to: * test an arbitrary type for being a function type of specified kind, * inspect properties of function types, * view and modify sub types of an encapsulated function type with MPL Sequence operations, and * synthesize function types. This library supports variadic functions and can be configured to support non-default calling conventions. Promotion Traits -------------------------- :Author: Alexander Nasonov :Review Manager: Tobias Schwinger :Download: http://cpp-experiment.sourceforge.net/promote-20050917.tar.gz :Description: Proposal to add promote, integral_promotion and floating_point_promotion class templates to type_traits library. Alexander tried it on different compilers with various success: GNU/Linux (gentoo-hardened): gcc 3.3 and 3.4, Intel 7, 8 and 9 Windows: VC7 free compiler Sparc Solaris: Sun C++ 5.3 and 5.7 See comments at the beginning of promote_enum_test.cpp for what is broken. Intrusive Containers -------------------- :Author: Olaf Krzikalla :Review Manager: Thorsten Ottosen :Download: http://people.freenet.de/turtle++/intrusive.zip :Description: While intrusive containers were and are widely used in C, they became more and more forgotten in the C++-world due to the presence of the standard containers, which don't support intrusive techniques. Boost.Intrusive not only reintroduces this technique to C++, but also encapsulates the implementation in STL-like interfaces. Hence anyone familiar with standard containers can use intrusive containers with ease. Fusion ------ :Author: Joel de Guzman :Review Manager: Ron Garcia :Download: http://spirit.sourceforge.net/dl_more/fusion_v2/ http://spirit.sourceforge.net/dl_more/fusion_v2.zip :Description: Fusion is a library of heterogenous containers and views and algorithms. A set of heterogenous containers (vector, list, set and map) is provided out of the box along with view classes that present various composable views over the data. The containers and views follow a common sequence concept with an underlying iterator concept that binds it all together, suitably making the algorithms fully generic over all sequence types. The architecture is somewhat modeled after MPL which in turn is modeled after STL. It is code-named "fusion" because the library is the "fusion" of compile time metaprogramming with runtime programming. Pimpl Pointer ------------- :Author: Asger Mangaard :Review Manager: Need Volunteer :Download: Boost Sandbox (http://boost-consulting.com/vault/) under pimpl_ptr. :Description: The pimpl idiom is widely used to reduce compile times and disable code coupling. It does so by moving private parts of a class from the .hpp file to the .cpp file. However, it's implementation can be tricky, and with many pitfalls (especially regarding memory management). The pimpl_ptr library is a single header file, implementing a special policy based smart pointer to greately ease the implementation of the pimpl idiom. Property Tree ------------- :Author: Marcin Kalicinski :Review Manager: Need Volunteer :Download: Boost Sandbox Vault - property_tree_rev4.zip http://kaalus.atspace.com/ptree :Description: Property tree is a data structure - a tree of (key, value) pairs. It differs from its cousin, "usual" property map, because it is hierarchical, not linear. Thus, it is more like a minimalistic Document Object Model, but not bound to any specific file format. It can store contents of XML files, windows registry, JSON files, INI files, even command line parameters. The library contains parsers for all these formats, and more. Physical Quantities System ------------- :Author: Andy Little :Review Manager: Need Volunteer :Download: http://tinyurl.com/7m5l8 :Description: PQS (Physical Quantities System) is used for modelling physical-quantities in C++ programs. The advantages over using built-in types in the role include: trapping errors in dimensional analysis, detailed semantic specifications for reliable and repeatable conversions between units and self-documentation of source code. PQS is based around the principles and guidelines of the International System of Units (SI). The library predefines a large number of quantities, physical and maths constants using a common syntax. The library also includes (or will soon include) classes for manipulating quantities algebraically, for example angles (radians, steradians, degrees,minutes,seconds) and vectors, matrices and quaternions for more advanced modelling of physical systems. Libraries under development =========================== Geometry Library - Author - Andy Little (?) C2_functions Library - Author - Marcus Mendenhall Please let us know of any libraries you are currently developing that you intend to submit for review.

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status of Boost Unicode library/enhancements ?
by Chris Pirazzi 01 Apr '06

01 Apr '06

Hello, I just scanned about 300 boost-devel messages with the word "Unicode" and am very excited about the occasional mentions I see of a Boost Unicode library. Is that project still alive? Is there a prototype or beta of any sort, or even a simple statement of goals I can look at for the proposed boost project? I am about to embark on a large text processing (but _not_ display) project and could make use of such a library. (digression: part of it will even involve the processing of Thai text, which seems to be the #1 cited example of a weird language as far as i18n is concerned. Having myself typeset a 283-page bilingual Thai-English book, I have to agree :) The last mentions I found were from late 2005, where Graham Barnett mentioned a Unicode library was under development: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/128403 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/129807 I tried searching the vault for 'unicode' but no dice. I have examined (and would use by default) ICU from IBM: http://icu.sourceforge.net/userguide/intro.html I would use its C++ UnicodeString, CharacterIterator, Locale-based codepage converters, Normalization support, Collation support, and regex matching (in particular with regex's that match character classes like "nonspacing mark"). How do the proposed Boost library's capabilities differ from those offered by ICU? I've seen that there is ICU integration in Boost.Regex http://www.boost.org/libs/regex/doc/unicode.html And of course it is possible today to store UTF-16 data in a std::wstring and convert between UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 using various easily available routines. But as you can see above I need more capability than just that. ICU is probably sufficient, but I thought it might be nice to use something that fits in with the rest of boost and STL more nicely. Something that used/extended existing string mechanisms, iteration mechanisms, and conversion mechanisms (e.g. those "code conversion facets" which I do not yet understand :). Consistent naming, error reporting, and coding conventions would be a superficial but nice added bonus. I would hope that any such library would make some stabs at performance enhancements such as ICU's UnicodeString's ability to alias other strings to avoid copies, or store very small strings inline. Since ICU has since disabled some of those enhancements: http://icu.sourceforge.net/userguide/strings.html#unistr_performance perhaps that would provide the Boost library an opportunity to beat ICU's performance! Thanks for all updates, - Chris Pirazzi

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Smart Pointer new/Forwarding Problem Solved (by Force)
by David Abrahams 31 Mar '06

31 Mar '06

I've developed some facilities that perhaps ought to be developed into full-fledged libraries or components of existing Boost libraries. This work centers around my long-standing threat to build a library that could create smart pointers safely, without ever exposing a raw pointer to the user. For example, #include <memory> #include <boost/shared_ptr.hpp> #include "new.hpp" struct foo { foo(int&, char const*, std::auto_ptr<int> const&); }; std::auto_ptr<int> x(new_<int>(3)); std::auto_ptr<foo> y(new_<foo>(*x, "hello, world", x)); boost::shared_ptr<foo> z(new_<foo>(*x, (char const*)"hello, world", x)); To solve this problem correctly, it was necessary to address "the forwarding problem" (http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2002/n1385.htm) To that end, I developed some preprocessor macros that one can use to generate the necessary overload sets. Is there interest in adopting any of this code (enclosed), and if so, where should it go? -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com

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version.hpp and 1.34
by Victor A. Wagner Jr. 31 Mar '06

31 Mar '06

I notice that version.hpp in both head and rc1_34_0 is the same this causes me many problems I further note that the install seems to name the resulting .lib and .dll files w/ 1_34 NOT 1_34_0 and I don't see where to change that for some reason I'm getting buffer overrruns in cl.exe (vc7.1) when doing V2 runs I've stopped doing cvs-head runs because of the filename collisions btw, the revision encoding mechanism that's currently in use will cause problems in the future, there's no way to tell the difference between 1_34_0 (103400) and 1_34 whch apparently also will encode to 103400 Victor A. Wagner Jr. http://rudbek.com The five most dangerous words in the English language: "There oughta be a law"

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program_options on sunpro cc
by Chris Bond 31 Mar '06

31 Mar '06

Hello, I've attached a patch to allow the program_options library to build on Sun's C++ compiler. Cheers, Chris Bond diff -ru boost_1_33_1/libs/program_options/src/options_description.cpp boost/libs/program_options/src/options_description.cpp --- boost_1_33_1/libs/program_options/src/options_description.cpp Wed Jul 13 09:32:40 2005 +++ boost/libs/program_options/src/options_description.cpp Thu Mar 30 18:35:19 2006 @@ -384,7 +384,7 @@ { // is last_space within the second half ot the // current line - if (unsigned(distance(last_space, line_end)) < + if (static_cast<unsigned int>(distance(last_space, line_end)) < (line_length - indent) / 2) { line_end = last_space;

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[date_time] parsing
by vaclav.vesely＠volny.cz 31 Mar '06

31 Mar '06

Parsing date and time with custom patterns is possible via input facets, but it's a bit cumbersome. I suppose, that developers usually writes their own functions like this: ptime pt = parse_date_time(str, format); I think, that these functions should be incorporeted in the library. Maybe there are better syntaxes. For example: ptime pt = ptime::parse(str, format); ptime pt = lexical_cast<ptime>(str, format); The same probably applies to formating output. But in that case the user can take individual elements of the value and format them with boost::format for example. I can help with implementing these functions once the proper syntax would be arranged. What do you think? Regards, Vaclav

1 0

weak_ptr debugging aid
by Patrick Julien 31 Mar '06

31 Mar '06

This is a feature request to add weak_use_count() to weak_ptr. I am not interested in this feature for anything else than a debugging aid. Recently, a weakness was highlighted in one of my projects, I had stale weak_ptr objects that would remain in core even if all copies of weak and shared pointer objects should have been eliminated by now. To confirm the bug fix and audit the rest of the code base, a debugger was used to set a conditional break point on internal members of weak_ptr. I would rather have the ability to write assertions when needed hence weak_use_count(). regards,

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bug in filesystem::wpath
by Mark Bartosik 31 Mar '06

31 Mar '06

bug in filesystem::wpath. In mirgrating to support wchar_t, a couple of lines were missed. m_path which has type of std::wstring is assigned a narrow character string resulting in a compilation error. inline below is a patch: +++ C:\Boost_CVS\CVSROOT\boost\boost\filesystem\path.hpp Wed Feb 22 22:52:11 2006 @@ -249,8 +249,8 @@ ~basic_path() {} // assignments - basic_path & operator=( const string_type & s ) { m_path=""; operator/=( s ); return *this; } - basic_path & operator=( const value_type * s ) { m_path=""; operator/=( s ); return *this; } + basic_path & operator=( const string_type & s ) { m_path.clear(); operator/=( s ); return *this; } + basic_path & operator=( const value_type * s ) { m_path.clear(); operator/=( s ); return *this; } # ifndef BOOST_NO_MEMBER_TEMPLATES template <class InputIterator> basic_path & assign( InputIterator first, InputIterator last ) I've taken a look for similar bugs and couldn't find any. Thanks

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[circular buffer] Happy Anniversary
by Martin Wille 30 Mar '06

30 Mar '06

Happy Anniversary, Boost.CircularBuffer, you have been accepted to Boost two years ago, after two weeks of thorough review. However, something sad happened then. You went away, leaving poor developers without a clue what your future might be, and causing much grief among the pieces of software that were awaiting to embrace you. Where did you go to? Are you doing well? Please, return! Sorrowfully yours, m Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com

5 4

[tuple] swap
by Václav Veselý 30 Mar '06

30 Mar '06

I've tried to make swap for tuples. It swap's tuple's items one by one. It work's fine in MSVC 7.1 and 8.0. MSVC 6.0 doesn't work correct due to not working Koeing lookup. I can defin swap for tuples in global namespace, but for swap individual items std::swap is always used. I don't know how to go around it. For GCC I have to write strange workaround - swap_tuples must take parameters by const reference. (see "#if defined(__GNUC__)"). I'm not sure if it's compiler bug or my fault. Can anyone explain? Regards, Vaclav

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