Re: [Boost-users] Request for an addition in Boost Coding standard

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] Request for an addition in Boost Coding standard
From: Gottlob Frege (gottlobfrege_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-06-18 22:10:48

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 8:05 AM, Daniel James <dnljms_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> On 17 June 2011 12:37, Gokulakannan Somasundaram <gokul007_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>>
>> Hmmm..  may be i am ignorant here. But here we are referring to classes
>> which contain containers like string and vector and deque.
>
> Then you're restricting future changes to the implementation by saying
> that memory can only managed using containers. You've also still got
> the problems I mentioned with separate compilation and increased
> complexity. For example, boost::filesystem::path is not a template and
> is largely compiled separately. If allocator support was required,
> that wouldn't be possible.
>
> The more general point is that adding any extra feature to a library
> increases its complexity and with each new feature this accumulates.
> So no extra feature is ever just a simple change.

Custom allocation doesn't always need to be done via template
arguments.  If, for example, boost::filesystem only needs to allocate
a string at some point, maybe a specific "string supplier" could be
passed in.  Just something to customize allocation.  Might not work in
all cases - I don't think we can enforce custom allocation for every
boost library - but we can encourage it in whatever way works for the
problem at hand.

Tony