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Boost Interest : |
From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-06-26 23:39:42
Doug Gregor wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 10:23 PM, David Abrahams <dave_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>> and interface changes across versions of Boost.
>
> soversions are the right way to deal with this issue, not name mangling.
Yeah, I know; I just don't really understand them yet ;-)
>>> People have been doing this on Unix systems for many,
>>> many years.
>> With C++? I know there are a few C++ libraries out there but I didn't
>> think many of them had the kind of variations that we seem to want to
>> have. What do other libraries do about each of the features described
>> in
>> http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_35_0/more/getting_started/unix-variants.html#library-naming?
>> Are all of those letters solving non-problems?
>
> They are real problems, but how many users will ever use more than
> one, default variant of the library?
very few, so your point is taken.
>> Just for example, in single-threaded programs, we apparently don't want
>> to make people pay for synchronization when shared_ptr is copied,
>> because then they'll say our general-purpose shared_ptr is slow. But
>> then you need separate libraries for single- and multi-threaded
>> programs. OK, shared_ptr is header-only, but I hope you get my point.
>
> I suggest that the vast majority of users should be using the
> multi-threaded versions; those that truly will only use Boost in
> single-threaded environments and are copying shared_ptrs so often that
> their performance is at risk can flip the right switches to build
> Boost differently. Few people need that freedom, so the rest of the
> users shouldn't pay for it with more complexity.
OK, agreed. Now do you think that auto-linking makes mangling make
sense on Windows, or should we drop it there, too?
-- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com