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BSL (pre-release)

• Online Library Documentation
• Quick-Start Guide

What is BSL?

BDE (Basic Development Environment) is a set of C++ software libraries as well as development tools and methodology. Originally developed at Bloomberg L.P., BDE is intended to form the foundation for large scale C++ software products.

The BSL (Basic Standard Library), the first BDE library available with an open-source license, provides implementations for portions of the C++ standard library, particularly the container types, as well as a suite of system-utilities, meta-functions, and algorithms needed to build such containers.

Goals and Benefits of BSL

BSL aims to provide libraries that meet superior standards in terms of their design, documentation, and testing (see Mission Statement). Every component (i.e., .h/.cpp file-pair) provides thorough component, class, and method level documentation (see Online Library Documentation) , including a compilable example for using that type. Every component also has a thorough test-driver that tests every public method of that component through a comprehensive range of input (see bslstl_map.t.cpp).

These libraries, along with the tools and methodology that accompany them, are meant to enable developers to create their own C++ software that meets similar standards of quality.

The Basic Standard Library

BSL provides a finely factored collection of tools that form the foundation for cross-platform component based development. The library culminates in the implementation of several standard containers which take advantage of the features of the rest of BSL. Some of the highlights of BSL include:

• Support for runtime polymorphic memory allocators

  • Provides more efficient application-specific memory-allocation behavior.
  • Provides facilities for testing memory allocation.
  • (see bslma)

• Enhanced type-trait support and trait-aware container facilities (see bslmf)

  • Provides for efficient move-semantics (similar to to C++11 move-semantics)
  • (see blsmf)

• Support for defensive programming through a configurable assert facility

  • Support for testing those defensive checks ("negative testing")
  • (see bsls_assert and bsls_asserttest)

• A facility for testing generic container instantiations with a range of troublesome types

  • (see bsltf)

• Implementations for basic atomic operations with flexible memory semantics

  • (see bsls_atomic)

Getting Started

The best place to get started is to read our introduction to building BSL and creating a "Hello World" application using that built library:

• Getting Started

Some other introductory material includes:

• The list of platforms on which BSL is supported can be found here
• Introduction to BDE memory allocators
• Introduction to the physical organization of the libraries
• BSL and STL
• Introduction to BDE Coding Standards

One of the key elements of the BDE libraries is the extensive header (i.e., component-level) documentation. Doxygen for BSL can be found here: Online Library Documentation, although the documentation in the headers themselves is intended for reading on its own (without doxygen).

Community Involvement

One of our goals in publishing BSL (and eventually BDE) is to encourage others to use these tools and adopt them in their software development processes. In the next few weeks, we'll be making various community tools available, including discussion forums/mailing lists, continuous integration infrastructure, and we'll be answering BSL questions on StackOverflow to begin building a knowledge base to help new users of BSL get started with their projects.

In addition, we're excited to see what the community of developers who want to help improve and extend BSL can bring to the equation. If you are interested in contributing to BSL itself, see Contributing to BSL to get started.

Future Plans

Development of BDE began in 2001, and it has been in production use for over a decade. BSL is the lowest level BDE library, but as we review higher level libraries (ensuring they are up to date with our coding standards) additional libraries will be made available with an open-source license. Some features of these additional libraries include:

• Additional concrete allocator implementations.
• Date, time, and calendar types.
• Cross-platform multi-threading & synchronization primitives.
• Efficient thread-pools, event schedulers, and thread-safe container types.
• Network channel pools and session pools.
• Logging infrastructure.

Our immediate focus is an extended a date (and time) facility along with additional memory-allocators, which we aim to provide in 2013.

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