- Boost - lists.boost.org

[Review] [ITL] ITL formal review results
by Hartmut Kaiser 29 Apr '10

29 Apr '10

Hi all, The formal review of the Interval Template Library (ITL) written by Joachim Faulhaber started February 18th and ended March 7th, 2010. We saw a lively discussion resulting in 14 votes: 10 people voted unconditionally YES, 3 voted conditionally YES, and 1 reviewer voted NO. The overwhelming majority of the votes was YES which reflects the overall discussion and the general consensus of this library being worth to be included into Boost. Based on this result and the discussions we saw the Interval Template Library is now formally accepted into Boost. Detailed results ---------------- Pros: Almost all reviewers highlighted the general usefulness of the library. The more experience the reviewers had with the library in real world applications the more they emphasized its usefulness. Here are some quotes: - "ITL solved this problem for me, in a way that honestly freed me from having to think about a lot of the unsavory low-level details." - " Until now, we only used the library for intervals of date-times (coded as integers), but I'm sure, that its usefulness goes far beyond." - " Very useful. I mentioned two projects where the library would have helped me if it had been into Boost earlier, and I'm considering rewriting them such that the problems make use of the library, and simplify them in that way." The comments on the quality of the documentation are unanimous: "impressive and quite complete", "I couldn't ask for more". It seemed to be generally helpful to understand the concepts of the library and to get started. Some people asked to add more simple quick-start examples to the documentation and the distribution. Overall, the library is mature and easy to use. All reviewers actually utilizing the ITL library for real world use cases reported they were able to start quickly and without problems. All reviewers using ITL in real world applications stated that no performance problems were encountered. This is important to note as the NO vote was based on the current lack of a interval tree implementation, which was considered to result in suboptimal performance for certain use cases. Cons: Some aspects of the design have been criticized: "OO-type design decisions", "fat 'one size fits all'-interval class template", and "incomplete extraction of global functions" are the major points of critique. These points have real merit. In order to make the design and interface more flexible and more durable these have to be rectified before the final inclusion of the library into Boost's code base. Joachim already agreed to a list of things to change addressing those problems. For certain use cases, specifically for interval map of collections, the current implementation has suboptimal complexity characteristics that leads to O(n^2) space usage in the worst case. OTOH, for the majority of applications of the library the worst case scenario seems to be (reportedly) irrelevant. This issue has been discussed at length and Joachim plans to add an implementation with a better worst case performance of the affected class templates as later optimizations. This is not considered to be a precondition to full inclusion into Boost's code base as it is not anticipated to cause any interface changes. Last but not least people suggested to change the name of the library as having the word template in the name does not carry any useful information. Joachim already agreed to this. Regards Hartmut Review Manager --------------- Meet me at BoostCon www.boostcon.com

3 3

About command line parameters parsing again...
by Denis Shevchenko 29 Apr '10

29 Apr '10

Hi all! Sorry for my English... During last two months I develop simple library for command line parameters parsing. Although there is many such libraries (e.g. on sf.net) I cannot find library with _realy_ simple using. Command line parameters parsing is simple, trivial task, so (imho) library for this task must be easy-to-learn and easy-to-use. Boost.Program_options is good and flexible library, but (imho) work with command line parameters must be easier. My library _not_ parse config file, because I like rule "one task - one library". My question: is it need in Boost another library for command line parameters parsing? P.S. Library: https://sourceforge.net/projects/clp-parser/ Denis

1 0

[range] irange is not very eloquent
by vicente.botet 29 Apr '10

29 Apr '10

Hi, I have find the function 'irange' in the section "Provided Ranges". template<class Integer> integer_range< range_detail::integer_iterator<Integer> > irange(Integer first, Integer last); I will expect in this section ranges and not functions. This function allows to treat integers as a model of the Random Access Range Concept. I find the name not very eloquent. What about make_integer_range, for example? BTW, I don't find the documentation of the the class integer_range. Where it is documented? Best, _____________________ Vicente Juan Botet Escribá http://viboes.blogspot.com/

3 10

[range] Permission to merge extensive documentation work from trunk.
by Neil Groves 29 Apr '10

29 Apr '10

Please may I merge just the documentation changes that have been performed on the trunk? These include: 1. corrections to documentation errors 2. complete documentation of the header files 3. acknowledgements for the Boost.RangeEx work. Regards, Neil Groves

3 6

[GSoC][boost.process] Blog
by Felipe Tanus 29 Apr '10

29 Apr '10

Hi, My project for Google Summer of Code was accepted, as many of you already know. I would like to give my thanks to anyone that supported me. I'll give my best in this project. Writing with my mentor, we decided that would be a good idea to keep an track from our actions, project decisions and have a place where interested people could help us without the need of we ask. Then, I created a blog that I'll write whenever I have something significant to tell. If you are interested in this project, I invite you to follow the updates from this blog[1] and comment whenever you like. This way, we might post in this mailing list only when it's strictly needed about the project. Thank you. [1] http://gsoc2010.fotanus.com -- Felipe de Oliveira Tanus E-mail: fotanus(a)gmail.com Blog: http://www.itlife.com.br Site: http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/~fotanus/ ----- "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." - Gandalf

1 0

[ANN] CodeSynthesis XSD 3.3.0 released
by Boris Kolpackov 29 Apr '10

29 Apr '10

Hi, I am pleased to announce the availability of CodeSynthesis XSD 3.3.0. CodeSynthesis XSD is an open-source (GPL2 + proprietary license), cross- platform W3C XML Schema to C++ data binding compiler. Provided with a schema, it generates C++ classes that represent the given vocabulary as well as parsing and serialization code. You can then access the data stored in XML using types and functions that semantically correspond to your application domain rather than dealing with elements, attributes, and text in a direct representation of XML such as DOM or SAX. The XSD compiler uses several Boost libraries (filesystem and regex) in its implementation. The generated code can also map XML Schema date/time built- in types to Boost date_time types. The C++ classes can also be serialized into various binary formats besides XML. Boost serialization library is supported as one of the representations. Major new features in this release: * Support for uniform parsing and serialization of XML documents with varying root elements. * Configurable application character encoding (UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, etc). * Support for stream-oriented, partially in-memory/partially event- driven XML parsing and serialization. * Support for embedding the binary representation of the schema grammar into the application. * Generation of the detach functions that allow moving object model sub-trees without copying. * Support for XML compression. * Smaller and faster generated code for polymorphic XML Schemas (xsi:type and substitution groups). The release also adds support for a range of new operating system and C++ compiler versions, including: * AIX 6.x * Mac OS X 10.6 * Windows 7, * Windows Server 2008 * Visual Studio 2010 (10.0) * GNU g++ 4.5.0 * Intel C++ 11 * Sun Studio 12.1 * IBM XL C++ 11 Visual Studio 2010 project and solution files are provided for all the examples. For the complete list of new features in this release see: http://www.codesynthesis.com/pipermail/xsd-announcements/2010/000038.html CodeSynthesis XSD is available on IBM AIX, GNU/Linux, HP-UX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Windows, OpenVMS, and z/OS. Supported C++ compilers include: GNU g++, HP aCC, IBM XL C++, Intel C++, Sun C++, and MS Visual C++. More information, documentation, source code, and precompiled binaries for all the supported platforms are available from: http://www.codesynthesis.com/products/xsd/ Boris -- Boris Kolpackov, Code Synthesis http://codesynthesis.com/~boris/blog Open-source XML data binding for C++ http://codesynthesis.com/products/xsd XML data binding for embedded systems http://codesynthesis.com/products/xsde Command line interface to C++ compiler http://codesynthesis.com/projects/cli

3 4

People in charge for the Boost-CMake mailing list
by Isidor Zeuner 29 Apr '10

29 Apr '10

Hello fellow Boosters, a couple of days ago I posted a message to the Boost-CMake mailing list and received a notification about the message awaiting moderator approval. Since then it was neither posted, nor did I receive a rejection notice. So I'm wondering if there is currently someone in charge of moderating this list, and if the message will expire at some point. Best regards, Isidor Zeuner

2 3

Request to merge r61263 into release branch
by Jeremiah Willcock 28 Apr '10

28 Apr '10

It's another begin/end disambiguation patch to fix VC++ 10 issues. -- Jeremiah Willcock

3 5

Concept check and __LINE__
by Matthew L. Creech 28 Apr '10

28 Apr '10

I made some trivial changes in a header file today, and suddenly it refused to compile, throwing out boost::concept_check errors. Here's an example error: In file included from /home/mlcreech/work/PCM-tk/etn_export/include/translator++.hpp:193, from ../../common/source/main.cpp:8: /home/mlcreech/work/PCM-tk/etn_export/include/translator/handle.hpp:119: error: conflicting declaration ‘typedef struct boost::concept::detail::instantiate<boost::concept::requirement<Model>::failed [with Model = toolkit::translator::Callable<toolkit::translator::CHandle<toolkit::translator::CValArray<toolkit::translator::CSimpleVal<double> > > >]> toolkit::translator::boost_concept_check119’ /home/mlcreech/work/PCM-tk/etn_export/include/translator/concept/translatable_archetype.hpp:119: error: ‘toolkit::translator::boost_concept_check119’ has a previous declaration as ‘typedef struct boost::concept::detail::instantiate<boost::concept::requirement<Model>::failed [with Model = toolkit::translator::Translatable<toolkit::translator::translatable_archetype<boost::null_archetype<int> > >]> toolkit::translator::boost_concept_check119’ make[3]: *** [translate++] Error 1 I had no idea what this was about, but then I went to look up where the supposed conflicts were and noticed that they were both on line 119. As it turns out, I have 2 different header files which have BOOST_CONCEPT_ASSERT() for different concepts at line 119. It seems that Boost internally generates some global names based on the line number, so it creates 2 identially-named enum definitions. From "boost/concept_check/general.hpp": # define BOOST_CONCEPT_ASSERT( ModelInParens ) \ enum { BOOST_PP_CAT(boost_concept_check,__LINE__) = \ ::boost::concept_check_<void(*) ModelInParens>::instantiate \ } Off-hand I'm not sure how to fix this in Boost (maybe some preprocessor tricks based on __FILE__?), but it seems like it should at least be documented as a limitation. Or maybe there's some other way of using BOOST_CONCEPT_ASSERT() that works around this? Obviously the immediate fix is trivial - add a few blank lines. I just thought I'd bring it up in case others hit the same problem. Thanks -- Matthew L. Creech

4 3

[handling mini-reviews] do we need formal scheduling for this?
by Thorsten Ottosen 28 Apr '10

28 Apr '10

Dar Boosters, Erwann has implemented some cool extensions to Boost.Assign that we would like to include. For example, his work allows code like A list of references (to temporaries, in this example): boost::array<int,9> a = cref_csv( 1,5,3,4,2,9,0,7 ) Chained ranges: vector<int> v = vector<int>( 3,1 ) && vector<int>( 3,2 ) && vector<int>( 3,3 ); See https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/statistics/support/boost/assign/ and https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/statistics/support/libs/assign/ for more info. I think the right thing to do is to make a mini-review. Do we need a special schedule for such reviews or should we just proceed with an announcement on the user and dev list? -Thorsten

2 1