March 2010 - Boost - lists.boost.org

[program_options]
by Thorsten Ottosen 08 Mar '10

08 Mar '10

Hi, I tried using bpo::options_description desc("Allowed options"); desc.add_options() (HELP, "produce help message"); but this fails to compile because HELP is an std::string. Isn't that a bit too restrictive? -Thorsten

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is review system in place is extremely slow? (was Re: [rfc] rcpp)
by vicente.botet 08 Mar '10

08 Mar '10

Hi, ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mathias Gaunard" <mathias.gaunard(a)ens-lyon.org> To: <boost(a)lists.boost.org> Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 2010 12:47 PM Subject: Re: [boost] [rfc] rcpp > > Ivan Sorokin wrote: >> 3 When will Boost.Move become a part of boost? > > When it gets reviewed. > It could be said, however, that the review system in place is extremely > slow and that it's going to take years (literally). Why do you think the review system in place is extremely slow? Currently there are a lot of libraries to review, but no review managers. That means that the user community don't want to spend a little bit of their time to manage a review. In addition, the last review didn't had too much of reviewers (I'm also concerned by this point) I'm the review manager of Boost.Task but the library is not ready for review, because now Boost.Task depends on Boost.Move, Boost.Fiber and Boost.Atomic (which is not yet on the review queue). Maybe the review withards could add this on the schedule page. What do you propose to improve it? Best, _____________________ Vicente Juan Botet Escribá

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Cooperative Multi-Tasking
by Daniel Larimer 08 Mar '10

08 Mar '10

I am curious whether anyone here has experience with any cross-platform cooperative multi-tasking libraries? I am familiar with the Boost.Coroutine library, but it only provides the "primitives" or "threads". What I am looking for is something much higher level that hides all of the coroutine details behind a asynchronous function call / future API. Something along the line of ASIO for coroutines. I am guessing that Boost.Asio would benefit from such a library. It seems obvious to me now that coroutines / cooperative multi-tasking is the superior approach to solving problems with a large number of actors and "locks" where heavy weight preemptive scheduling would bog down the system. Considering that cooperative multitasking is a very old concept, are there any reasons why there are no obvious libraries / scheduling systems in place? Does everyone "roll their own" or do they avoid it for some other reason? Dan

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[Tokenmap] A (perfect) hash container library chcked-in to sandbox (RFC)
by Slawomir Lisznianski 08 Mar '10

08 Mar '10

http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/tokenmap/libs/tokenmap/doc/html/inde… A tokenmap is a data structure that uniquely maps pseudo-random generated keys with elements of the collection. Boost.Tokenmap is a (perfect) hash container library for C++. An important distinction between tokenmap and other dictionary-like containers, such as std::map or Boost.Unordered, is that tokenmap generates keys internally (referred to as "tokens") rather than relying on user to provide them. Specifically, when a new element is inserted into the tokenmap, an apparently random key is returned back to the caller which uniquely maps to the stored element. The returned key can later be used in a very efficient lookup. Although the code and documentation are far from complete, the implementation in the repo is functional and hopefully serves as a basis for further work. Slawomir

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[Itl] Review
by Phil Endecott 08 Mar '10

08 Mar '10

My review of the proposed Interval Template Library follows. This is based only on studying the documentation, and previous discussion of the library on the Boost mailing list (e.g. http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2009/03/149396.php ). Joachim has clearly put a lot of work into what is a substantial and well-documented library. Unfortunately, it seems to me that it is built on a weak foundation. One of the most well-known problems involving intervals is to determine which of a given set of intervals contains a particular point. How to store a set of intervals in such a way as to make this problem efficient has been extensively studied. If an "interval tree" (See e.g. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_tree) is used, then the problem can be answered in logarithmic time and linear space. (More precisely: if there are N intervals in the container and M overlap the point of interest, finding them should take O(M + log N) time and the data structure should take O(N) space.) I was hoping to find that this library was an implementation of an interval tree. But it is not: it is built on top of normal standard-library containers. The implementation used can find the intervals that overlap a point in O(M + log N) time, but to do so it needs worst-case O(N^2) space and I think it needs O(N^2 log N) time to build that structure. Presumably this complexity is not an issue in Joachim's application. Unfortunately, library code will be used in many different applications including those where optimal complexity is required. For example, consider trying to store the lifespans of people in a genealogy program: recording a few thousand people living over a few hundred years would approach the worse-case space complexity and need megabytes of storage. Perhaps other reviewers will feel that there are sufficient applications where this library is suitable to justify its inclusion in Boost. My feeling is that since the interval tree data structure is so well known and its performance is so much better, we should not accept this library. Ideally it would be possible for Joachim to replace ITL's current standard containers with an interval tree implementation. Could an interval tree be implemented with an interval sufficiently similar to a std::set/map to make that possible, without losing the complexity benefits? Once again, I believe that apart from this weak foundation this looks like an excellent submission that is comprehensive and well-documented. Regards, Phil.

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[Review] ITL review starts today, February 18th
by Hartmut Kaiser 07 Mar '10

07 Mar '10

Hi all, The formal review of the Interval Template Library (ITL) starts today, February 18th, 2010 and will end February 27th, 2010. ITL is being developed by Joachim Faulhaber. ------------------------------------------------ About the library: The Interval Template Library (ITL) is a library of interval containers that facilitates computations on collections of intervals and associated values. Use cases of such computations typically occur in the date and time problem domain, when collections of time intervals with associated data are analyzed, combined and aggregated. But the scope of applications for interval containers is more general and not limited to date and time problems. Interval containers allow to access and manipulate collections of intervals on an abstract level as sets and maps (of elements), but also to exploit segmental information that is given by the interval borders. Interval containers are fairly generic. They can be instantiated with discrete domain (or key) types like integral numeric types or boost::date or time types. But they also work with continuous domain types like double, rational or string. Using the latter allows to represent infinite sets and maps. The interface of the interval containers strives to be very intuitive and in line with the stl and other boost libraries. * The set theoretic operations union, difference, intersection and symmetric difference are available as operators for all interval containers and for many useful overloads between them. * There is iterator support on the level of segments and interval containers can be combined with stl containers of intervals via stl algorithms. * For discrete domain types, element iterators are available which makes interval sets and maps models of SortedAssociative Containers so they can be used with many stl algorithms. All interval containers are addable and subtractable. The addability and subtractability concept of the ITL leads to a general mechanism of aggregation on interval_maps which is called 'aggregate on overlap'. Exploiting 'aggregate on overlap' allows to compute many useful aggregation results in a simple and abstract manner. The ITL's Set and Map concepts are defined by a signature and collections of laws or axioms. Those semantical constraints have been validated using automatic law based tests. This gives the library both a well founded formal specification and an unusual thorough test base. The ITL emerged out of real world use cases and is successfully used at Cortex Software GmbH since a couple of years in the production code of various applications. On the boost developer's list it has been proposed in four previews and a review request since May 2008 and has been refactored and refined according to boost standards and suggestions from the list. The ITL is available from the boost vault: http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=itl_3_2 _0.zip&directory=Containers Documentation is online available at: http://www.herold-faulhaber.de/boost_itl/doc/libs/itl/doc/html/index.html The current sources are in the sandbox: https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/itl/ ------------------------------------------------ Everybody on this list is invited to participate in this formal review. I hope to see your review of this library, including your vote, and I welcome your participation in the discussions on the Boost mailing list. Please always state in your review, whether you think the library should be accepted as a Boost library. Additionally, please consider giving feedback on the following general topics: - What is your evaluation of the design? - What is your evaluation of the implementation? - What is your evaluation of the documentation? - What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library? - Did you try to use the library? With what compiler? Did you have any problems? - How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A quick reading? In-depth study? - Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain? Regards Hartmut Review Manager --------------- Meet me at BoostCon www.boostcon.com

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[Boost][Test] Small issue with explicit function initialization
by Sylvain Bougerel 07 Mar '10

07 Mar '10

Hi, I'm not sure if it's an issue or not. But I noticed that the given code does not compile: #define BOOST_TEST_MAIN #include <boost/test/included/unit_test.hpp> template <typename Tp1, typename Tp2> inline Tp2 stupid_cast (const Tp1& arg) { return static_cast<Tp2>(arg); } BOOST_AUTO_TEST_CASE( test_details_key ) { BOOST_CHECK(stupid_cast<float, int>(1.0) == 1); } It give the following error with g++ (GCC) 4.4.3: try.cpp:40:48: error: macro "BOOST_CHECK" passed 2 arguments, but takes just 1 try.cpp: In member function 'void test_details_key::test_method()': try.cpp:40: error: 'BOOST_CHECK' was not declared in this scope While the following does compile (and runs well): #define BOOST_TEST_MAIN #include <boost/test/included/unit_test.hpp> template <typename Tp1, typename Tp2> inline Tp2 stupid_cast (const Tp1& arg) { return static_cast<Tp2>(arg); } BOOST_AUTO_TEST_CASE( test_details_key ) { BOOST_CHECK((stupid_cast<float, int>(1.0) == 1)); // <----- I wrapped it in parenthesis } So I was wondering whether the BOOST_<level> macro (I did check that the others suffer the same problem) are expected to behave in this way, or they are just missing an extra layer of parenthesis around the arguments, or even GCC is at fault, or I'm missing something definitely... Regards, Sylvain

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Re: [boost] [Review] ITL review starts today, February 18th
by Brian Wood 07 Mar '10

07 Mar '10

Joachim Faulhaber writes: > Let me put it this way: > std::set : could be model of itl::Set, if operators were implemented > itl::set : is model of itl::Set > itl::interval_set : is model of itl::Set but implemented via intervals > boost::dynamic_bitset : is almost model of itl::Set but implemented > via arrays of machine words. Joachim and I have previously discussed the names of some of the classes in his library in the context of serialization: *http://preview.tinyurl.com/y86phqg* I don't have plans yet to add support for this library to the C++ Middleware Writer, but I would suggest that you consider where you will be able to come up with serialization support for the library. I believe your options will be to add it yourself with Boost Serialization or go without it. If you stick with the names of some of the classes that you have today, at the very least, I'll put off developing marshalling support for the library. Brian Wood http://webEbenezer.net (651) 251-9384 "Then Samuel took a rock and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer [Rock of Help] and said, 'Until now the L-RD has helped us.'"

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[transact] Handling with user exceptions
by vicente.botet 07 Mar '10

07 Mar '10

Hi, I would like to initiate a discussion on how to manage with user exceptions. Here follows some thougth I'm implementing in Boost.STM. There are two main ways to manage with user exceptions: * exceptions commit transactions - corresponds to the current C++ behavior * exceptions abort on exit - corresponds to rollback The behavior associated to the curent language-like macros is to throw the catched exception. In this case, the exception shouldn't contain references to transaction specific objects. I was wondering if we cannot add a second family of macros that before a user exception leaves the transaction block the transaction is commited. BOOST_TRANSACT_A_ family will abort the transaction on user exception BOOST_TRANSACT_C_ family will commit the transaction on user exception This will allows to explore which both approaches, and see which approach is more usable, or if there is an approach that is better adapted to some particuler contexts. * Exceptions Commit Transactions - How to get this? While trying to commit on destruction we have catched any exception to release the commit_on_destruction variable. commit_on_destruction __comm( __txn ) ; t ry { i f ( false ) ; else / / to for ce a sentence / / t r a n s a c t i o n sentence } catch ( . . . ) { __comm. release ( ) ; throw ; } To make exception commit transactions by default, we should not release the committer. However, we need to avoid exception throw by commit when the transaction has been set as forced to abort or during unwinding exception. commit_on_destruction __comm( __txn ) ; t ry { <sentence > } catch ( . . . ) { i f ( __txn_.forced_to_abort ( ) ) __comm.release ( ) ; else __comm.commit ( ) ; throw ; } We need how to override the default behavior. If we have Exceptions Commit Transactions - we can abort the transaction in two ways: * Explicit try-block to Abort Transactions * Explicitly abort before throw - Explicit try-block to Abort Transactions The user may want the exception abort the transaction while leaving the transaction block. The user must explicitly state that this is the desired behavior by adding a try-catch block as shown below: BOOST_STM_C_TRANSACTION t ry { / / t r a n s a c t i o n block } catch (Ex&) { BOOST_STM_ABORT( ) ; throw ; } BOOST_STM_C_END_TRANSACTION; - Explicitly abort before throw The user may want the transaction to be aborted before throwing an exception. The user may explicitly state that this is the desired either by setting the current transaction as forced to abort, BOOST_STM_ABORT( ) ; throw except ( ) ; or by throwing the exception using the macro : / / . . . BOOST_STM_ABORT_AND_THROW( except ( ) ) ; / / . . . If we have Exceptions Abort on Exit we can commit the transaction as follows: - Explicit try-block to Commit Transactions The user must explicitly state that this is the desired behavior by adding a try-catch block as shown below: BOOST_STM_TRANSACTION t ry { / / t r a n s a c t i o n block } catch (Ex &ex ) { BOOST_STM_COMMIT( ) ; throw ; } BOOST_STM_END_TRANSACTION; boost::exception_ptr error; BOOST_STM_TRANSACTION t ry { / / t r a n s a c t i o n block } catch (Ex &) { error=boost::current_exception(); } BOOST_STM_END_TRANSACTION; if( error) boost::rethrow_exception(error); } Please let me know what do you think? Do you find this useful? Should we provide two families of macros? Best regards, _____________________ Vicente Juan Botet Escribá

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[Review] The review of the ITL library ends today, March 7th
by Hartmut Kaiser 07 Mar '10

07 Mar '10

Hey all, The review of Joachim Faulhabers ITL library ends today, March 7th 2010. Please get your reviews in today or get in contact with me to agree on some offline schedule. Regards Hartmut Review Manager --------------- Meet me at BoostCon www.boostcon.com

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