November 2020 - Boost - lists.boost.org

CMake Announcement from Boost Steering Committee
by Jon Kalb 13 Aug '24

13 Aug '24

The libraries produced by the Boost community have had a greater impact on the way that the C++ community writes code than any other library implementation. The focus of the Boost community will always be on the libraries, but it is undeniable that we are dependent on and often limited by the infrastructure of our trade. Years ago, the move to Git was contentious; yet, it was required to improve development. In a similar vein our build system has become an impediment for many developers and users, existing and prospective. Therefore, we, the Steering Committee, announce to the Boost community our desire and intent to move Boost’s build system to CMake for users and developers alike. We are soliciting comments and proposals from the community to guide the process and the goals. Our desire is that the community can come to consensus by the end of the calendar year with a vision of supporting users and developers. We understand that the actual process of achieving the end goal will be long, time consuming, and not without its share of conflict. We also recognize that the Boost community is comprised of bright and passionate individuals that are eager to get involved and help get work done. The members of the Steering Committee have been encouraged by the discussions and activity surrounding CMake on the mailing lists over the years and know that many people have voiced visions. We hope that each of you rejoins the discussion to support this initiative and contributes to the common goal of improving Boost’s integration into the broader C++ ecosystem. For the Boost Steering Committee, Jon Kalb, Chair jonkalb(a)boost.org

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Boost.Text is looking for a (mini-)review manager
by Zach Laine 07 Dec '22

07 Dec '22

I've made all the recommended changes to Boost.Text that came up in the review. Glen, the previous review manager, recommended a mini review of Boost.Text once I'd made those changes. If you'd like to manage the mini-review, please let me know. For everyone, including potential reviewers and review managers, here are the major changes: * All the specific review feedback issues have been addressed. * The string layer is now gone. * The text layer got a major re-work. It is now a set of template-based adaptors (basic_text<>, vs. a text typedef. etc.), which lets everyone get what they want. You can change the underlying storage type (including whatever allocator you prefer), select UTF-8 or UTF-16, and change the normalization form. Glen recommended I drop this layer, but the library is way less useful without this stuff, and these changes address all the concerns raised about the text layer in the review. The updated docs can be found here: https://tzlaine.github.io/text/doc/html/index.html Oh yeah, and I added concept constraints to the whole library when you build in C++20 mode. Zach

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[review][JSON] Review of JSON starts today: Sept 14 - Sept 23
by Pranam Lashkari 09 Aug '22

09 Aug '22

Boost formal review of Vinnie Falco and Krystian Stasiowski's library JSON starts today and will run for 10 days ending on 23 Sept 2020. Both of these authors have already developed a couple of libraries which are accepted in Boost(boost beast and Static String) This library focuses on a common and popular use-case for JSON. It provides a container to hold parsed and serialised JSON types. It provides more flexibility and better benchmark performance than its competitors. JSON highlights the following features in the documentation: - Fast compilation - Require only C++11 - Fast streaming parser and serializer - Easy and safe API with allocator support - Constant-time key lookup for objects - Options to allow non-standard JSON - Compile without Boost, define BOOST_JSON_STANDALONE - Optional header-only, without linking to a library (a point I would like to add in highlight: it has cool Jason logo 😝) To quickly understand and get the flavour of the library take a look at "Quick Look" <http://master.json.cpp.al/json/usage/quick_look.html> You can find the source code to be reviewed here: <https://github.com/CPPAlliance/json/tree/master> You can find the latest documentation here: <http://master.json.cpp.al/> Benchmarks are also given in the document which can be found here: <http://master.json.cpp.al/json/benchmarks.html> Some people have also given the early reviews, the thread can be found here: <https://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2020/09/249745.php> Please provide in your review information you think is valuable to understand your choice to ACCEPT or REJECT including JSON as a Boost library. Please be explicit about your decision (ACCEPT or REJECT). Some other questions you might want to consider answering: - 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 which compiler(s)? 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? More information about the Boost Formal Review Process can be found here: <http://www.boost.org/community/reviews.html> Thank you for your effort in the Boost community. -- Thank you, Pranam Lashkari, https://lpranam.github.io/

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Adding my sorting algorithm, ska_sort, to boost, attempt 2
by Malte Skarupke 24 Nov '21

24 Nov '21

Hi everyone, I started a discussion about this in October, but at the time the maintainer of the sort library was busy, then I was busy, so now it's January... I wrote a generalized version of radix sort a couple years ago and gave a talk about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqs87a_7zxw I would like to get a new version of that sorting algorithm into boost. It's faster than what I showed several years ago. It's also even more general and has a new interface that should be easier to extend. I uploaded the code here: https://github.com/skarupke/sort/tree/master The documentation is also already updated with new benchmark results. Let me know what's required to get this into boost. Would you like this in the form of a pull request? One of the big things that probably needs review is the interface, since radix sorting works differently than comparison based sorting. For most normal uses you just need to provide a sort key, but more complicated cases can get more complicated. I tried very hard to make everything easy, but I'd also be curious if others can come up with better ways of doing the interface. Thanks, Malte -- Malte Skarupke malteskarupke(a)fastmail.fm

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[release] Reminder about 1.75.0 release notes
by Marshall Clow 11 Mar '21

11 Mar '21

The master branch is closing on Wednesday for the 1.75.0 release. If you have information that should go into the release notes, now’s the time to add it. Create a PR against https://github.com/boostorg/website/blob/master/feed/history/boost_1_75_0.q… <https://github.com/boostorg/website/blob/master/feed/history/boost_1_75_0.q…> — Marshall

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The new Boost 17.0.0
by Antony Polukhin 11 Dec '20

11 Dec '20

Hi, == The problem. TL;DR: we are having huge troubles with usability and popularity! Quite a lot of companies forbid using Boost because: * it provides vocabulary types, that should be the same across the whole project (like shared_ptr, filesystem::path or optional). Otherwise it's hard to combine different APIs * it is huge, in consists of legacy on more than a half, with a lot of dependencies between libraries. This is extremely painful for big companies, because there's no efficient distributed build system. Each company invents it's own and/or tries to minimize headers by all means. New companies (startups) also avoid Boost: * "We are using C++17, we do not want legacy libraries with C++98 support" * Junior developers are confused by multiple vocabulary types. "Should we use boost::optional or std::optional?" * hard to upgrade, because symbols are not versioned ISO C++ WG21 community not willing to push prototypes into Boost. "We aim to establish "existing practice" and provide reference implementations so that Boost libraries are suitable for eventual standardization." - that's not really true any more. == The Solution TL;DR: we need a C++17 fork of Boost with close to 0 dependencies between libraries and namespace versioning. С++17 provides many vocabulary types, feature test macro and a bunch of features for variadic templates. All of that allows us to drop a lot of weight and fix majority of popularity and usability problems. Rule of a thumb should be: "If the C++17 provides that functionality - use the standard version". That approach would allow to loose a lot of weight, do not mess with vocabulary types and significantly reduce dependencies https://pdimov.github.io/boostdep-report/master/module-levels.html By levels: config 0 -> we probably would not need it any more assert 1 -> 0 core 2 -> 1 (or 0 if we merge it with asser) smart_ptr 4 -> 2 exception 5 -> 2 stacktrace 5 -> 2 intrusive 5 -> 2 outcome 6 -> 3 container 6 -> 3 gil 11 -> 2? context 16 -> 2? dll 17 -> 1 asio 18 -> 3? beast 19 -> 4? == The Path TL;DR: we should start the Boost17 now and ship it as we are ready. Old Boost should be still available. The new approach requires quite a lot of effort and not all the maintainers have enough time to do the migration. We should keep releasing the existing Boost, while migrating the libraries to the Boost17. The migration is not as hard as it seems. It took 2 or 3 days to make Boost.DLL work with either boost or std filesystem. It could be done in less than a day, if I do not have to support the Boost filesystem. == Action points 0) Discuss 1) Bury the idea, wait for a few years, goto 0); or make a boost17 repo with the same layout as the existing one, but without submodules 2) start the migration -- Best regards, Antony Polukhin

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[release] 1.75.0 post-beta merges
by Marshall Clow 03 Dec '20

03 Dec '20

The master branch is is now open for post-beta merges, but only as described in the Post-Beta Merge Policy. See <https://github.com/boostorg/wiki/wiki/Releases%3A-Beta-Merge-Policy> Reminder: The master branch closes for the release on December 2nd. Full calendar here: https://www.boost.org/development/ -- The release managers

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PolyCollection
by Brian Wood 30 Nov '20

30 Nov '20

Shalom Hey, is anyone using PolyCollection? I have serialization support for it: https://github.com/Ebenezer-group/onwards/tree/master/example/poly If you considered it, but chose an alternative library, what was the reason? Thanks. Brian Ebenezer Enterprises - Enjoying programming again. https://webEbenezer.net

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[release] Issues
by Glen Fernandes 30 Nov '20

30 Nov '20

Need resolution: * Boost.Utility's <boost/operators.hpp> and C++20 * Boost.uBLAS tests failing C++03 and C++14. (They were failing C++20 but I cherry-picked the allocator fixes from develop, so these pass now) Glen

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Re: [boost] The new Boost 17.0.0
by Glen Fernandes 29 Nov '20

29 Nov '20

On 2020-11-29, Raffi Enficiaud wrote: > 0/ For the discussions I am all for it, but I would absolutely not try > to gather consensus. Because there won't be. You definitely don't need consensus. You are free to drop C++03 and C++11 and C++14 support from Boost.Test whenever you want. We've been steadily migrating Boost libraries away from using Boost.Test to using Boost.LightweightTest for various reasons. (And have plans to migrate a few more to Boost.LightweightTest by Boost 1.76) So you can decide to require C++17 or higher for Boost.Test and not have to worry about other Boost libraries. We'll make sure their tests are still working by moving them to LWT. Just give us some warning, before you drop any support. :) Glen

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Re: [boost] The new Boost 17.0.0
by Glen Fernandes 27 Nov '20

27 Nov '20

Dominique Devienne wrote: > > Glen Fernandes wrote >> I would not be in favor of a Boost distribution that requires anything >> higher than C++11 for existing libraries. i.e. Not C++17 or even >> C++14. > > But that's basically Boost as it stands, i.e. Boost 1.x. > I don't think anyone's proposing to drop that. That's Boost 1.x with more C++11 and less C++03 - with authors who choose to drop C++03 support, requiring C++11 at a minimum as per: https://pdimov.github.io/articles/phasing_out_cxx03.html This is something which Boost authors are actually acting on. e.g. Boost.Math and Boost.Multiprecision as of a future Boost 1.77 release: https://www.boost.org/users/history/version_1_73_0.html <quote> Math * IMPORTANT: C++03 support is now deprecated and will be removed from March 2021. </quote> <quote> Multiprecision * IMPORTANT: C++03 support is now deprecated and will be removed from March 2021. </quote> i.e. This is promising because people support this particular proposal enough to do something, not just for the (potentially unlimited) joy of discussing it on a list. > But isn't this just a "teething" issue? I see Ville already replied in fact. I'm following this discussion over this in C++ committee EWG reflector. I'm optimistic that people will do the right thing by users. But I prefer to make decisions based on what I know now, and what has bitten users today, with -std=c++20 and GCC 10.1 that has already shipped, not speculation about what will happen. As I said before, this is just me. C++11 (not higher, not C++17 or C++20) is just what I support and what I'd be willing to put in work towards in existing Boost libraries (and even volunteer to do for those that I do not currently maintain, but would welcome the contributions). Other authors remain free to drop support for everything besides C++17 or C++20 if they want. Glen

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Re: [boost] The new Boost 17.0.0
by Glen Fernandes 27 Nov '20

27 Nov '20

Speaking only for myself as an author of a Boost library, maintainer of many Boost libraries, and contributor to many Boost libraries, as well as being involved in the Boost release process: 1. Based on my personal knowledge of Boost users, as well as e-mails to the Boost developers lists (boost@...), and the Boost Owners lists (boost-owner@...) from users such as: - @us.af.mil (US Airforce) - @nasa.gov (NASA) and others I would not be in favor of a Boost distribution that requires anything higher than C++11 for existing libraries. i.e. Not C++17 or even C++14. 2. Based on first hand accounts of certain users choosing not to migrate to C++20 because of a silently breaking change in the language affecting their code (operator== rewriting rules, which has even broken certain Boost libraries like Rational), I would certainly not be in favor of changing existing Boost libraries to require C++20 for anything in an official Boost distribution. Glen

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Re: [boost] [release] 1.75.0 post-beta merges
by Peter Dimov 27 Nov '20

27 Nov '20

>>>> ...failed testing.capture-output >>>> ..\..\bin.v2\libs\filesystem\test\operations_unit_test.test\clang-win-10.0.0\release\threading-multi\operations_unit_test.run... ... > This looks like a Clang x86 codegen bug. The compiler returns the > `file_status` from `get_status` on the stack and then overwrites it with > `push` instructions for some reason. > > Not the first x86 clang-cl problem. I'll upgrade from 10.0 to 11.0 to see > if it's fixed. Still not fixed in 11.0.

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[random] Merging to master for 1.75 release
by Edward Diener 25 Nov '20

25 Nov '20

Is there any possibility of merging 'develop' to 'master' for the random library for the 1.75 release ? The 'master' branch has not been updated for 2 years, or since the 1.70 release. While I am not claiming all invaluable fixes I know my fix for Embarcadero C++ clang-based support and another fix for correctly auto-linking random_device is among the 'develop' branch fixes which have never made it to the 'master' branch.

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Submitting release notes
by Andrzej Krzemienski 25 Nov '20

25 Nov '20

I am sorry for this silly question, but can someone remind me, where we file PR-s with library release notes? Can someone point me to the place where this is documented? Regards, &rzej;

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[leaf] Request to merge bug fix to master for 1.75 release
by Emil Dotchevski 24 Nov '20

24 Nov '20

I'm requesting permission to merge a bug fix by vector-of-bool in LEAF which makes it work correctly with std::system_error: https://github.com/boostorg/leaf/pull/15/commits/efc56d1c703777fea4fef2bd24… (There is a minor related change on top of this PR, but this bug fix is the important change in behavior. Note that LEAF is a new library in 1.75).

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[release] Boost 1.75.0 Beta 1 Release Candidate 2
by Marshall Clow 17 Nov '20

17 Nov '20

The second release candidates for the 1.75.0 beta release are now available at: <https://dl.bintray.com/boostorg/beta/1.75.0.beta1/source/> The SHA256 checksums are as follows: 3f01d3e5dc822e151892040d4667e364ea808d208d2e49cc7a1802bd4da3d4cc boost_1_75_0_b1_rc2.7z 9b75a80f845d4ae312e3c9151ffdfe3fed450973095e0a15c68d0be394f2f2df boost_1_75_0_b1_rc2.tar.bz2 123519d4b056fbbd69e452db880abe2c7e55f21779d44a4d6b6c714d5c13c3ee boost_1_75_0_b1_rc2.tar.gz b73e01d22d5b3d2ff82f14a371e3974fab30448bf6ff5ac8b9c829539a19c2d7 boost_1_75_0_b1_rc2.zip As always, the release managers would appreciate it if you download the candidate of your choice and give building it a try. Please report both success and failure, and anything else that is noteworthy. -- The Release managers

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[release] Fixing Boost.Rational and boost/operators.hpp infinite loop in C++20 by 1.75
by Glen Fernandes 16 Nov '20

16 Nov '20

We have a problem with Boost.Rational and <boost/operators.hpp> in Boost.Utility in C++20 standards mode. I've fixed Boost.Rational in develop. Relevant GitHub issues: 1. https://github.com/boostorg/rational/issues/43 2. https://github.com/boostorg/utility/issues/65 My fix for Boost.Rational that I will merge to master for the 1.75 release: https://github.com/boostorg/rational/pull/45 The root cause is the same. C++20 adds new language rules that implicitly generate some operators, and the current implementations result in an infinite loop. (In both cases an equality operator ends up calling itself recursively). GCC does emit a warning diagnostic in C++20 mode, but as usual these tend to be unnoticed at build time. ../../boost/rational.hpp:779:16: warning: in C++20 this comparison calls the current function recursively with reversed arguments 779 | return a == b; | ~~^~~~ So this issue was found by three independent users of Rational (one who reported a Github issue, the other who complained on Reddit, and a third that tried running the Rational unit tests with GCC10 and found two failures). <boost/operators.hpp> in Boost.Utility still needs a fix for C++20 mode, but it has an active maintainer unlike Rational. The GitHub issue for it was closed (I've reopened it) because it was assumed to be a defect in the standard and one that vendors would fix. We did have some discussion on the C++ standard committee reflector about this, however - whatever the future change to the standard is - GCC and Clang with -std=c++20 that implement these rules have already been released and users are using it, so we should fix this in Boost 1.75. Glen

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Re: [boost] [release] 1.75.0 post-beta merges
by Glen Fernandes 16 Nov '20

16 Nov '20

Robert Ramey wrote: > request permission to sync changes in develop into master for > two libraries: serialization and safe_numerics. They've been ready for > some time, I just forgot to do it in time. Go ahead. Glen

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[release] Boost 1.74.0 beta 1 released
by Marshall Clow 14 Nov '20

14 Nov '20

Boost release 1.75.0 beta 1 is now available at: <https://dl.bintray.com/boostorg/beta/1.75.0.beta1/source/> The SHA256 checksums are as follows: 3f01d3e5dc822e151892040d4667e364ea808d208d2e49cc7a1802bd4da3d4cc boost_1_75_0_b1.7z 9b75a80f845d4ae312e3c9151ffdfe3fed450973095e0a15c68d0be394f2f2df boost_1_75_0_b1.tar.bz2 123519d4b056fbbd69e452db880abe2c7e55f21779d44a4d6b6c714d5c13c3ee boost_1_75_0_b1.tar.gz b73e01d22d5b3d2ff82f14a371e3974fab30448bf6ff5ac8b9c829539a19c2d7 boost_1_75_0_b1.zip For details of what's in the release, see <https://www.boost.org/users/history/version_1_75_0.html>. Please download the beta, give it a try, and report any problems you encounter. Thanks, -- The Boost Release Team

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Boost.Exception regression in 1.75.0 beta 1
by Niall Douglas 14 Nov '20

14 Nov '20

If you diagnose the test failures (which are present across all compilers) in https://www.boost.org/development/tests/develop/developer/outcome.html which report failures of the form: ``` unknown location(0): fatal error: in "works_outcome": Throw location unknown (consider using BOOST_THROW_EXCEPTION) Dynamic exception type: struct boost::wrapexcept<class boost::exception_ptr> libs\outcome\test\tests\core-outcome.cpp(173): last checkpoint *** 1 failure is detected in the test module "Outcome" ``` The cause is test code such as: ``` boost::system::error_code ec(5, boost::system::system_category()); auto e = boost::copy_exception(boost::system::system_error(ec)); // NOLINT outcome<int> m(e); BOOST_CHECK_THROW(m.value(), boost::system::system_error); ``` Outcome calls boost::rethrow_exception() to rethrow the exception_ptr. boost::rethrow_exception() is not rethrowing the boost::system::system_error held within the boost::exception_ptr. It is throwing instead boost::wrapexcept<class boost::exception_ptr>. This causes BOOST_CHECK_THROW() to not correctly trap the type of exception thrown, and thus the test fails. boost::wrapexcept<E> inherits from E. It seems to me therefore that catching a const E& ought to catch throws of boost::wrapexcept<E>, and therefore this code is correct. I double checked this at https://wandbox.org/permlink/n9Wjb5cPpfHEFalp, and indeed it works as expected. However, obviously enough this is failing, and it was not failing in Boost 1.74, so this is a regression. I am stumped as to the exact cause. This affects all platforms, POSIX, Windows, clang, GCC and MSVC. Niall

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permission to merge fix
by Oliver Kowalke 08 Nov '20

08 Nov '20

Do I get permission to merge a fix related to boostorg/fiber#264 <https://github.com/boostorg/fiber/issues/264> into master? Oliver

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[release] Boost 1.75.0 Beta 1 Release Candidate 1
by Marshall Clow 07 Nov '20

07 Nov '20

The first release candidates for the 1.75.0 beta release are now available at: <https://dl.bintray.com/boostorg/release/1.75.0.beta1/source/> The SHA256 checksums are as follows: c271f488c7c8de7c147bf8675d578fb2f06c6c171d9547c5a40cddccb9f2a6c4 boost_1_75_0_b1_rc1.7z 0db0944e9d2250907e011900eea304ca055d1c418d38b3fbb1eee692a6b851a6 boost_1_75_0_b1_rc1.tar.bz2 624bd6b03d86bf1387b4e8927dab16b4198f255f15dd71d6a8c1c5ec270584b3 boost_1_75_0_b1_rc1.tar.gz 07ddca7c39ea9152bad73bee4f10f2c9c8e3a2d7e153aa945a343f83eca5db59 boost_1_75_0_b1_rc1.zip As always, the release managers would appreciate it if you download the candidate of your choice and give building it a try. Please report both success and failure, and anything else that is noteworthy. -- The Release managers

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[1.75 release] Merging 'develop' to 'master' for Embarcadero fix
by Edward Diener 06 Nov '20

06 Nov '20

A number of libraries have my PR to enable Embarcadero C++ clang-based compilers for Boost in their 'develop' branch but the branch has not been merged to 'master' for the 1.75 release. In the large majority of cases my PR for Embarcadero is the only difference between 'develop' and 'master'. These libraries are: assign circular_buffer container_hash date_time foreach graph iostreams numeric_conversion optional pool ptr_container random static_assert thread typeof units unordered If any of the maintainers of these libraries could see fit to get my PR in 'master' from 'develop' for the 1.75 release, it would be appreciated. I can assert that the PR causes no problems in the 'develop' regression tests for the aforementioned libraries. I have also opened up an issue for each of the aforementioned libraries in their Github page regarding my request.

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[release] Master branch now closed for 1.75.0 beta release
by Marshall Clow 06 Nov '20

06 Nov '20

Please do not make any commits to the master branch.

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