July 2021 - 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 Governance?
by René Ferdinand Rivera Morell 10 Aug '24

10 Aug '24

A disclaimer: I write this solely as a Boost Library author. And not in any other capacity or representing any other interest. It's now been at least a year since Boost switched from the Software Freedom Conservancy to the Boost Foundation for its governance organization. But have people noticed any difference? Did you know that switch happened? Did you know that they held an election for the Board of Directors and for the Officers? Do you know when that election happened? Do you know who got elected? Do you know how they were selected? Do you know what their responsibilities are? Do you know what their bylaws are? Do you know their financials? More importantly: Did you answer "no" to any of those questions? As a library author, I can say I definitely answered no to many of those questions. This is a problem. As authors, without asking, we should know those answers from the organization that governs our work. We should have input into how that organization governs. In other words, we deserve open and transparent governance; not the closed and opaque status quo. -- -- René Ferdinand Rivera Morell -- Don't Assume Anything -- No Supone Nada -- Robot Dreams - http://robot-dreams.net

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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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[container] Contributing 'stationary_vector' to Boost
by Mehrdad Niknami 13 Jun '22

13 Jun '22

Hi all, Happy new year! New mailing list member here. I've developed an STL-style stationary_vector class that retains elements in-place when growing. Very briefly, it is effectively a piecewise-contiguous vector, with the following advantages over vector: - Appending has O(1) overhead in the *worst* case (e.g., push_back() does not move elements) - Insertion and random-access can be done in parallel, as prior iterators & references remain valid This has a variety of benefits, including better UX (no "hiccups" due to reallocations), and the ability to simplify parallel processing of streaming data. It occurred to me the larger C++ community might find this useful. I was wondering if there would be interest in incorporating it into Boost.Container, and if so, what steps I could take to make that happen? I'm of course happy to discuss the design etc. with anyone who might be interested. Summary: https://github.com/mehrdadn/libvital/blob/master/doc/vital/container/statio… Implementation: https://github.com/mehrdadn/libvital/blob/master/include/vital/container/st… Thank you, Mehrdad

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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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I would like to add boost::algorithm::is_clamped, how to proceed?
by Ivan Matek 13 Aug '21

13 Aug '21

Hi, I would like to add is_clamped (that tests if the value is clamped, similar how we have std::is_sorted, std::sort). What would be the proper procedure? I have never committed to boost, so I have no access to any repository, no "contacts", so I have no idea if small proposals like this require just approval from owner or it needs broader discussion(for example in some cases it would be nice fix for missing chain comparison <https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/chaining-comparison-operators-python/> in core language, but then is_clamped name is not that nice, is_between might be nicer,...). Also I am not sure if this is the best place to ask for directions and do discussions, if you have some slack channel or forum you prefer please let me know. There was a proposal <http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2019/p1440r0.html>for std::, but it is not in C++20. I have no relation to that proposal. regards, Ivan

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Regexp performance guarantees
by Phil Endecott 30 Jul '21

30 Jul '21

Dear Experts, I recently wanted to add some input-sanitising code to a C++ web application, and as I had some existing Javascript code I decided to port its regex-based input checking to the C++ code. This didn't go as well as I had expected! Here's an example of the sort of thing I have: if (!regexp_match(s, regex("[A-Za-z0-9-_/]{1,8192}"))) throw MalformedInput(); The Javascript equivalent seems to be fine. In C++, with libstdc++'s regex implementation, it seems to take about 2 seconds to run. Boost.Regex didn't like the '-' after the '9' but when I fixed that the execution time became negligible. Boost.Xpressive seems also to be fast. On investigation it seems that this is due to there being two different algorithms, one of which (DFA) is linear in the string size but exponential in the pattern size (which in this case seems to mean exponential in the max repeat value of 8192), and the other (backtracking) is linear in the pattern size but exponential in the string size. It seems that the standard deliberately doesn't specify complexity guarantees for std::regex, leaving the choice of algorithm to the implementation. I find this a bit surprising. It's true that both algorithms have their strengths, but not knowing which you are going to get is the worst of both worlds - you would have to assume that it will be exponential in both pattern and string sizes in portable code! (Imagine a container that doesn't disclose whether it has vector or list complexity!) So I'm wondering if it would be useful for regex libraries to somehow be explicit about which algorithm they are and what the complexity is. Compare, for example, with the text search algorithms (Boyer-Moore etc) which indicate the algorithm in their names. Could we have regex_dfa / regex_backtracking, or something? Now having said that, I think that what I really need for my application is something that is worst-case linear in both the pattern size and the input string. I'm not sure if the apparently-fast Boost.Regex algorithm has a worst-case input that is slow. ("Regular Expression Denial Of Service"). It's clear that my example can be written without a regex as a simple linear loop, and maybe some regex libraries have heuristics that do that. Thoughts anyone? Regards, Phil.

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[release] 1.77.0 post-beta merges
by Marshall Clow 30 Jul '21

30 Jul '21

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 Wednesday, August 4th. Full calendar here: https://www.boost.org/development/ <https://www.boost.org/development/> — Marshall P.S Doc changes and test changes do NOT require release manager approval to be merged.

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Different Lib/CMake Layout between Pre-Build-Binaries and Build from source
by Dennis Luehring 26 Jul '21

26 Jul '21

target_link_libaries(... Boost::boost) seems not to work if the stagedir/<lib> folder is missing but the pre-build binaries missing this folder https://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/boost-binaries/1.75.0/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/boost-binaries/1.75.0/boost_1_… boost_1_75_0 <boost> ... bootstrap.bat bootstrap.sh <lib64-msvc-14.1> <cmake> *.lib if i build 1.75.0 from source with b2 --toolset=msvc-14.1 --stagedir=./lib64-msvc-14.1 address-model=64 architecture=x86 link=static threading=multi i've get this hierachy c:\Boost\boost_1_75_0 <boost> ... bootstrap.bat bootstrap.sh ... <lib64-msvc-14.1> <-- stagedir <lib> <cmake> *.lib what is the very same hierarchy with Qt6 cmake-configs (so its seems to be "more" standard) C:\Qt\6.1.2 <msvc2017_64> <-- aka "stagedir" <lib> <cmake> Qt6*.lib why does the pre build binary package got a different hierarchy?

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