November 2008 - Boost - lists.boost.org

Proposed addition to the iterator library for iterating over all tuples.
by Alex Mendes da Costa 19 Jun '09

19 Jun '09

Hi folks: I quite often have to write code to do the following: Given N sequences, generate all the N-tuples s.t. the i'th element in each tuple is drawn from the i'th sequence. For example, if sequence S1 is { 1, 2, 3 } and sequence S2 is { 10, 20 }, I need to generate these tuples: (1, 10), (2, 10), (1, 20), (2, 20). I think this problem could be solved elegantly with a iterator similar to zip_iterator. I have some questions: (1) Is there already a way to do this in boost? (2) If not, would this be a worthwhile addition to the iterator library? (3) If so, could I contribute code for this, or must the existing library owners write it? (4) If so, how would I go about getting my code added? Most of the docs seem to be about submitting entire libraries, rather than extensions to existing libraries. Thanks, Alex

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[mpl] is there a or_seq like logical metafunction?
by vicente.botet 17 Jun '09

17 Jun '09

Hello, I needs calculate the mlp::or_ of a sequence of nullary logical metafunction. This seams quite simple. I have do the following: <code> template <typename Seq> struct or_seq; template <typename Seq, long N> struct or_seq_aux : mpl::or_< typename mpl::front<Seq>::type, or_seq<typename mpl::pop_front<Seq>::type> > {}; template <typename Seq> struct or_seq_aux<Seq, 1> : mpl::front<Seq>::type {}; template <typename Seq> struct or_seq : or_seq_aux<Seq, mpl::size<Seq>::value> {}; </code> Is there a boost or_seq like logical metafunction? Is there a better way to do it? I would be extremely interested in any suggestions. Best regards --------------------------- Vicente Juan Botet Escriba

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Proposed templated integer_sort
by Steven Ross 25 Apr '09

25 Apr '09

Would there be interest in an integer_sort call that is faster than std::sort? Spreadsort is an in-place hybrid radix-based and comparison-based algorithm with better worst-case and average-case (roughly 20-50%) performance than introsort on random integer data. The worst-case advantage is algorithmic, with Spreadsort taking the better of O(n(square_root(bit_sizeof(data) - log(n)))) and O(nlog(n)) time. For 32-bit integers, that's O(n(square_root(32 - log(n)))), so for a log(n) of 16 (65536 items), it's 4n (plus a small constant times n), vs 16n for introsort. For larger n, the advantage vs. pure comparison-based algorithms increases. In effect, Spreadsort smoothly transitions from pure MSB Radix sort to std::sort with its data cut up by a couple iterations of MSB Radix sort (reducing the size of the log(n) factor), depending upon the distribution and size of the data. I could write a templated version of Spreadsort for the Boost library if there is interest. It would work for anything that supports the << and - operators. It could also handle standard floats sorted as integers. Functors supporting << and - could make it more general. Multi-dimensional sorting is also sped up by Spreadsort. I could also write a similar string_sort, that should also be significantly faster than std::sort. This would look much like postal sort, just using introsort after a certain number of iterations. Is this of interest? http://sourceforge.net/projects/spreadsort

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Boost.Process 0.3 released
by Boris 14 Apr '09

14 Apr '09

I've released Boost.Process 0.3. Here's the documentation and a link to download the zip archive: Docs: http://www.highscore.de/boost/process/ Code: http://www.highscore.de/boost/process.zip It's a header-only library and thus pretty easy to use: Just copy the files to your Boost directory. In this release my main goal was to merge various snapshots: * There was my Boost.Process 0.2 version which was based on Boost.Process 0.1 from 2006. * There was a post-0.1 version of Boost.Process in SVN from 2007. * Chris Fairles had modified a Boost.Process snapshot for Unix platforms. * Ion Gaztañaga had also some ideas and bug fixes he sent to this mailing list recently. I just saw that Ilya Sokolov created another snapshot based on Boost.Process in SVN. That means we have again at least two different versions of Boost.Process. :-/ In my Boost.Process 0.3 version I concentrated on merging and overhauling code. I did not change the design but tried to make the code work: All the code which was written since 2006 should become usable. That's why I also concentrated a lot on test cases. There are quite a lot of test cases, and they all can be built and passed successfully on three platforms with four compilers. As it would be great if others run the test cases, too (ideally on new platforms), I'll send another message in a few minutes with a description how to run the test cases yourself. As the documentation was written in 2006 I also updated it. It's not yet really a good documentation: There are some files coming from 2006 while other files I wrote myself only last week. While the documentation can be improved it's at least up-to-date: The examples all work and can be compiled. As the documentation was not my priority for Boost.Process 0.3 it should be ok for now. Boris

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Final report of GSOC project 'Spatial Indexes'
by Federico J. Fernández 27 Mar '09

27 Mar '09

Hi List! I'm writing this email as a final report of my Google Summer of Code 2008 project for Boost. My project consist in adding some spatial indexing structures to Boost in the context of the Geometry proposal done by Barend Gehrels. Spatial indexes are data structures optimized for spatial oriented queries. The classic index structures (i.e. a binary tree) aren't spatially enabled, they have different ordering criteria but none of them relates to topological properties. The scope of these structures is really wide, from collision detection for games to geometry indexing for GIS software. The original project goals were: - Build a Quadtree. - Build an rTree. - Integrate some previous work from a former GSoC project of a k-d-tree. - Test and document everything. Both indexes are implemented now and everything is tested and documented. The only task that we didn't complete is the k-d-tree integration, because when we analyzed the code it was not ready, and we didn't have the time to finish it. About the results, we made several tests and benchmarks. We tested both indexes with 230.000 objects from GIS data to check the correctness of the implementation, and we made some benchmarks comparing the quadtree vs. rtree and comparing both of them to existing implementation (like GEOS) with very good results. We describe this benchmarks in the documentation offering this as a guide to choose the best index for each use. The code is still beta (or maybe alpha) and not recommended for production use because it is still not tested enough, but if you want to check the actual status you can find it in the following location: https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/SOC/2008/spacial_indexing/ And the docs are at: https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/SOC/2008/spacial_indexing/libs/spat… The future work now is huge. We have some ideas about integrating this in some way to multindexes, and we want to implement also a 'packed' version of the rtree to improve bulk-loading times among another things. Finally, I would like to thank to Boost for allowing me to be part of this year's SOC. And specially to my mentor Hartmut Kaiser for all his help during the program. -- federico j. fernandez

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[endian] superfluous boost::operators<> ?
by Roland Schwarz 26 Mar '09

26 Mar '09

I discovered, that the following will not compile: unsigned u; ulittle32_t u1; ulittle32_t u2; u = 1; u1 = 1; u2 = u1 + u; The compiler complains about not being able to resolve similar conversions. My guess is, that using boost::operators<> _and_ providing type conversion operators at the same time is causing this. I think it should be enough to define the essential operators in cover_operators template, and omit boost::operators<> at all. At least I am not able to find any problems with this, since the compiler adjusts the arguments (using the provided type conversion operators?) and calls the built in operators, thereby resolving ambiguity. Any thoughts? -- _________________________________________ _ _ | Roland Schwarz |_)(_ | aka. speedsnail | \__) | mailto:roland.schwarz@chello.at ________| http://www.blackspace.at

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Re: [boost] [Boost-users] Maintenace Guidelines wiki page
by vicente.botet 15 Mar '09

15 Mar '09

----- Original Message ----- From: "Tomas Puverle" <Tomas.Puverle(a)morganstanley.com> To: <boost-users(a)lists.boost.org> Sent: Sunday, November 23, 2008 4:31 AM Subject: Re: [Boost-users] Maintenace Guidelines wiki page > >> I have started the Maintenace Guidelines wiki page. >> >> You can access it directly >> https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/Guidelines/MaintenanceGuidelines >> >> or via https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki >> >> Guidelines >> * Maintenance Guidelines >> >> There page need to be completed and surely reworked but this is an starting >> point. >> >> Please be free to improve the page directly or post your comments or > suggestions to this list. >> >> Hopping this goes on the right direction, > > Vincente, > > A few ideas: How will you evaluate that your proposal is actually successful > and being followed by the boost developers? Hi, First this is proposal for guidelines. So people will be after all free to follow some of them or not. I'm expecting from people like you to improve it so it could be followed by more people. > Also, check out Daniel Walker's idea in the Boost.Range thread on boost.devel > about not having the engineers in charge of their own QA. Daniel Walker's idea " Perhaps a procedural solution that could avert this problem in the future is to quarantine the test cases. Authors can maintain commit privileges to their libraries on trunk, but only a select group of independent guardians have commit privileges to the test cases. That way there is a guarantee that libraries pass the same tests from one release to another. If an author would like to make a change that would break a test case, he or she would need to present the change to the list and submit a patch to the test case sentinels. This would be a fairly simple quality assurance protocol: engineers aren't allowed to do their own QA." This is already considered on the guidelines insome way. "Preserve the test from the preceding versions [author] The test from the preceding versions should not be changed when the author modifies its library. These not changed tests are a probe of compatibility with the preceding version. When these test must be changed they indicate a breaking user code issue. So instead of changing them add new ones stating explicitly on which version they were included. Old tests that should fail can be moved to the compile_fail or run_fail tests on the Jamfile. " The Daniel proposal implies some changes in the writing rights of the authors. I prefer to let this point out of these guidelines. Of course I think that this is a good idea. There is another guideline that could be used by the Boost comunity to check the author has not changed the old test cases. "Inspect announced modifications [author, user, RM] The use of the diff file will help to inspect that the modifications introduced have been correctly included on the documentation and a good test coverage has been done. This will result in a non official mini-review of the library. " I will add to check that the old testcases have not been changed. > Finally, please consider the idea of "core" and "new" release cycles, where the > components in "core" have much more stringent requirements on how and when they > are allowed to change. IMO this is out of the scope of the guidelines. Note that at the end it is up to the author to make the modification he/she consider pertinent. Could you send what you have in mind in the form of guidelines? > Finally, do you think it may have been better to start this thread on > boost.devel? I belived that i did it on both. I'm answering to both each time. Should I start a new thread including the guidelines contents? Vicente

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Design conventions; passing functors
by Joachim Faulhaber 04 Mar '09

04 Mar '09

Hi, I am pondering about functor passing. Functors occur in my library (ITL) e.g. for the aggregation of associated values on insertion in interval_maps (aggregation on overlap): template<class Domain, class Codomain, ...> class interval_map{ ... //(1) My current implementation is this: // Combinator is the aggregating functor template, // instantiated at compiletime template<template<class>class Combinator> interval_map& add(const value_type& value_pair) { /*Combinator template passed or instantiated somewhere*/ } ... } //I like this definition, because it's abstract: // The functor has to be a matching template e.g. inplace_max interval_map<int,int> m; m.add<inplace_max>(some); //(1) template<class Domain, class Codomain, ...> class interval_map{ //(2) The more traditional definition template<class Combinator> interval_map& add(const value_type& value_pair) { /*Combinator type passed or called somewhere*/ } ... m.add<inplace_max<int> >(some); //(2) I prefer (1) but both definitions (1) and (2) are purely static denotations. To have adaptable functors or functors that can have states, like in ... m.add(some, max_under(42)); ... I am afraid I have to say sayonara to definition (1) and use this instead: template<class Domain, class Codomain, ...> class interval_map{ //(3) Adaptable functor template<template<class>class Combinator> interval_map& add(const value_type& value_pair, const Combinator<Codomain>& combine) { /*combine functor passed or called somewhere*/ } Now, there seems to be a convention from the STL that functors shall be passed BY VALUE. template<template<class>class Combinator> interval_map& add(const value_type& value_pair, Combinator<Codomain> combine); This is stated in [Sutter & Alexandrecu 2005, C++ Coding Standards] item 89: "Function objects are modeled on function pointers. Like function pointers, the convention is to pass them by value. All of the standard algorithms pass objects by value, and your algorithms should too." I do not really understand this convention and feel some resistance to follow it. In addition the call by value implementation can (and will) lead to heavy inefficiency by unaware usage of fat functors. So I browsed through some boost libraries and found that functors are passed by reference there (e.g. accumulators, fusion). Final question: What is the boost standard on passing functors, that I can adapt to? Cheers Joachim

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N2346 - Defaulted and Deleted Functions emulation
by vicente.botet 02 Mar '09

02 Mar '09

Hi, is there an interest in a N2346 - Defaulted and Deleted Functions emulation http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n2346.htm The idea been to use some macros that will use the =default, =delete if the compiler provides it and replace this macros by whatever has the same semantics. Alexandrescu introduced already two macros NON_ALIAS and NON_HEAP_ALLOCATED when talking about strict locks. Attached a draft for the default and deleted functions. Only one remark the macors must be used on the public part and without trailing ';', e.g. class X { BOOST_NEW_DELETE(X) Any coments are welcome, Vicente

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Profiling template instantiations
by Steven Watanabe 12 Feb '09

12 Feb '09

AMDG Over the last few days, I've been working on a tool that counts the number of class template instantiations in a translation unit. To use it from a jamfile import profile_templates : : directory of the tool ; template-profile result : some_file.cpp : <include>some_directories ; If everything works, this will create a file with the extension .tp which will contain the number of times each class template was instantiated, with the most common templates at the top. I've put a zip of a rough version in the vault. http://www.boost-consulting.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filenam… Caveats: I've only tested with Visual C++ 9.0 and gcc 3.4.4 on cygwin so far. Other compilers won't work, yet. Other versions of these compilers may or may not work. It may be necessary to add link=static to the bjam command line. In Christ, Steven Watanabe

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