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Review Wizard Status Report for December 2009

News

Polygon Library Accepted

Boost 1.40 Released
New Libraries: None Revised Libraries: Accumulators, Asio, Circular Buffer, Filesystem, Foreach, Function, Fusion, Hash, Interprocess, Intrusive, MPL, Program Options, Proto, Python, Serialization, Unordered, Xpressive

Geometry Library Accepted

Boost 1.41 Released
New Libraries: Property Tree Revised Libraries: DateTime, Filesystem, Iostreams, Math, Multi-index Containers, Proto, Python, Regex, Spirit, System, Thread, Unordered, Utility, Wave, Xpressive

MSM Library Review Underway

Constrained Value Review - Review Result still Pending

Older Issues

The Time Series Library, accepted in August 2007, has not yet been submitted to SVN.

The Floating Point Utilities Library, has not yet been submitted to SVN. It is slated to be integrated with the Boost.Math library.

The Switch Library, accepted provisionally in January 2008, has not yet been submitted for mini-review and full acceptance.

The Phoenix Library, accepted provisionally in September 2008, has not yet been submitted for mini-review and full acceptance.

For libraries that are still waiting to get into SVN, please get them ready and into the repository. The developers did some great work making the libraries, so don't miss the chance to share that work with others.

General Announcements

As always, we need experienced review managers. The review queue has been growing substantially but we have had few volunteers, so manage reviews if possible and if not please make sure to watch the review schedule and participate. Please take a look at the list of libraries in need of managers and check out their descriptions. In general review managers are active boost participants or library contributors. If you can serve as review manager for any of them, email Ron Garcia or John Phillips, "garcia at osl dot iu dot edu" and "phillips at mps dot ohio-state dot edu" respectively.

We are also suffering from a lack of reviewers. While we all understand time pressures and the need to complete paying work, the strength of Boost is based on the detailed and informed reviews submitted by you. A recent effort is trying to secure at least five people who promise to submit reviews as a precondition to starting the review period. Consider volunteering for this and even taking the time to create the review as early as possible. No rule says you can only work on a review during the review period.

A link to this report will be posted to www.boost.org. If you would like us to make any modifications or additions to this report before we do that, please email Ron or John.

If you're a library author and plan on submitting a library for review in the next 3-6 months, send Ron or John a short description of your library and we'll add it to the Libraries Under Construction below. We know that there are many libraries that are near completion, but we have hard time keeping track all of them. Please keep us informed about your progress.

The included review queue isn't a classic queue. It is more an unordered list of the libraries awaiting review. As such, any library in the queue can be reviewed once the developer is ready and a review manager works with the wizards and the developer to schedule a review. It is not FIFO.

Review Queue

  • Lexer
  • Shifted Pointer
  • Logging
  • Log
  • Join
  • Pimpl
  • Task
  • Endian
  • Conversion
  • Sorting
  • GIL.IO
  • AutoBuffer
  • String Convert
  • Move
  • Containers
  • Interval Containers
  • Type Traits Extensions
  • Interthreads
  • Bitfield
  • Lockfree

Lexer

Author:Ben Hanson
Review Manager:Eric Neibler
Download:Boost Vault
Description:A programmable lexical analyser generator inspired by 'flex'. Like flex, it is programmed by the use of regular expressions and outputs a state machine as a number of DFAs utilising equivalence classes for compression.

Shifted Pointer

Author:Phil Bouchard
Review Manager:Needed
Download:Boost Vault
Description:Smart pointers are in general optimized for a specific resource (memory usage, CPU cycles, user friendliness, ...) depending on what the user need to make the most of. The purpose of this smart pointer is mainly to allocate the reference counter (or owner) and the object itself at the same time so that dynamic memory management is simplified thus accelerated and cheaper on the memory map.

Logging

Author:John Torjo
Review Manager:Gennadiy Rozental
Download:http://torjo.com/log2/
Description:Used properly, logging is a very powerful tool. Besides aiding debugging/testing, it can also show you how your application is used. The Boost Logging Library allows just for that, supporting a lot of scenarios, ranging from very simple (dumping all to one destination), to very complex (multiple logs, some enabled/some not, levels, etc). It features a very simple and flexible interface, efficient filtering of messages, thread-safety, formatters and destinations, easy manipulation of logs, finding the best logger/filter classes based on your application's needs, you can define your own macros and much more!

Log

Author:Andrey Semashev
Review Manager:Needed
Download:Boost Vault
Description:The library is aimed to help adding logging features to applications. It provides out-of-box support for many widely used capabilities, such as formatting and filtering based on attributes, sending logs to a syslog server or to Windows Event Log, or simply storing logs into files. It also provides basic support for the library initialization from a settings file. The library can also be used for a wider range of tasks and implement gathering and processing statistical information or notifying user about application events.

Join

Author:Yigong Liu
Review Manager:Needed
Download:http://channel.sourceforge.net/
Description:Join is an asynchronous, message based C++ concurrency library based on join calculus. It is applicable both to multi-threaded applications and to the orchestration of asynchronous, event-based applications. It follows Comega's design and implementation and builds with Boost facilities. It provides a high level concurrency API with asynchronous methods, synchronous methods, and chords which are "join-patterns" defining the synchronization, asynchrony, and concurrency.

Pimpl

Author:Vladimir Batov
Review Manager:Needed
Download:
Description:The Pimpl idiom is a simple yet robust technique to minimize coupling via the separation of interface and implementation and then implementation hiding. This library provides a convenient yet flexible and generic deployment technique for the Pimpl idiom. It's seemingly complete and broadly applicable, yet minimal, simple and pleasant to use.

Task

Author:

Oliver Kowalke
Review Manager:

Needed
Download:

Boost Vault
Description:

Formerly called Thread Pool The library provides: * thread creation policies:

  • determines the management of worker threads:
  • fixed set of threads in pool
  • create workerthreads on demand (depending on context)
  • let worker threads ime out after certain idle time
  • channel policies: manages access to queued tasks:
    • bounded channel with high and low watermark for queuing tasks
    • unbounded channel with unlimited number of queued tasks
    • rendezvous syncron hand-over between producer and consumer threads
  • queueing policy: determines how tasks will be removed from channel:
    • FIFO
    • LIFO
    • priority queue (attribute assigned to task)
    • smart insertions and extractions (for instance remove oldest task with certain attribute by newest one)
  • tasks can be chained and lazy submit of taks is also supported (thanks to Braddocks future library).
  • returns a task object from the submit function. The task it self can be interrupted if its is cooperative (means it has some interruption points in its code -> this_thread::interruption_point() ).

Endian

Author:Beman Dawes
Review Manager:Needed
Download:http://mysite.verizon.net/beman/endian-0.10.zip
Description:

Conversion

Author:

Vicente Botet
Review Manager:

Needed
Download:

Boost Vault
Description:

Generic explicit conversion between unrelated types.

Boost.Conversion provides:
  • a generic convert_to function which can be specialized by the user to make explicit conversion between unrelated types.
  • a generic assign_to function which can be specialized by the user to make explicit assignation between unrelated types.
  • conversion between std::complex of explicitly convertible types.
  • conversion between std::pair of explicitly convertible types.
  • conversion between boost::optional of explicitly convertible types.
  • conversion between boost::rational of explicitly convertible types.
  • conversion between boost::interval of explicitly convertible types.
  • conversion between boost::chrono::time_point and boost::ptime.
  • conversion between boost::chrono::duration and boost::time_duration.

Sorting

Author:

Steven Ross
Review Manager:

Needed
Download:

Boost Vault
Description:

A grouping of 3 templated hybrid radix/comparison-based sorting algorithms that provide superior worst-case and average-case performance to std::sort: integer_sort, which sorts fixed-size data types that support a rightshift (default of >>) and a comparison (default of <) operator. float_sort, which sorts standard floating-point numbers by safely casting them to integers. string_sort, which sorts variable-length data types, and is optimized for 8-bit character strings.

All 3 algorithms have O(n(k/s + s)) runtime where k is the number of bits in the data type and s is a constant, and limited memory overhead (in the kB for realistic inputs). In testing, integer_sort varies from 35% faster to 8X as fast as std::sort, depending on processor, compiler optimizations, and data distribution. float_sort is roughly 7X as fast as std::sort on x86 processors. string_sort is roughly 2X as fast as std::sort.

GIL.IO

Author:Christian Henning
Review Manager:Needed
Download:GIL Google Code Vault
Description:I/O extension for boost::gil which allows reading and writing of/in various image formats ( tiff, jpeg, png, etc ). This review will also include the Toolbox extension which adds some common functionality to gil, such as new color spaces, algorithms, etc.

AutoBuffer

Author:Thorsten Ottosen
Review Manager:Needed
Download:Here
Description:Boost.AutoBuffer provides a container for efficient dynamic, local buffers. Furthermore, the container may be used as an alternative to std::vector, offering greater flexibility and sometimes better performance.

String Convert

Author:

Vladimir Batov
Review Manager:

Needed
Download:

Boost Vault
Description:

The library takes the approach of boost::lexical_cast in the area of string-to-type and type-to-string conversions, builds on the past boost::lexical_cast experience and advances that conversion functionality further to additionally provide:

  • throwing and non-throwing conversion-failure behavior;
  • support for the default value to be returned when conversion fails;
  • two types of the conversion-failure check -- basic and better/safe;
  • formatting support based on the standard I/O Streams and the standard (or user-defined) I/O Stream-based manipulators (like std::hex, std::scientific, etc.);
  • locale support;
  • support for boost::range-compliant char and wchar_t-based string containers;
  • no DefaultConstructibility requirement for the Target type;
  • consistent framework to uniformly incorporate any type-to-type conversions.

It is an essential tool with applications making extensive use of configuration files or having to process/prepare considerable amounts of data in, say, XML, etc.

Move

Author:Ion Gaztanaga
Review Manager:Needed
Download:http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/move/ and online documentation at http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/move/libs/move/doc/html/index.html
Description:In C++0x, move semantics are implemented with the introduction of rvalue references. They allow us to implement move() without verbosity or runtime overhead. Boost.Move is a library that offers tools to implement those move semantics not only in compilers with rvalue references but also in compilers conforming to C++03.

Containers

Author:Ion Gaztanaga
Review Manager:Needed
Download:http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=boost.move.container.zip&directory=Containers&
Documentation:http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/move/libs/container/doc/html/index.html
Description:Boost.Container library implements several well-known containers, including STL containers. The aim of the library is to offers advanced features not present in standard containers or to offer the latest standard draft features for compilers that comply with C++03.

Interval Containers Library

Author:

Joachim Faulhaber
Download:

http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=itl_3_2_0.zip&directory=Containers
Documentation:

http://herold-faulhaber.de/boost_itl/doc/libs/itl/doc/html/index.html
Review Manager:

Needed
Description:

The Interval Template Library (Itl) provides intervals and two kinds of interval containers: Interval_sets and interval_maps. Interval_sets and maps can be used just as sets or maps of elements. Yet they are much more space and time efficient when the elements occur in contiguous chunks: intervals. This is obviously the case in many problem domains, particularly in fields that deal with problems related to date and time.

Interval containers allow for intersection with interval_sets to work with segmentation. For instance you might want to intersect an interval container with a grid of months and then iterate over those months.

Finally interval_maps provide aggregation on associated values, if added intervals overlap with intervals that are stored in the interval_map. This feature is called aggregate on overlap. It is shown by example:

typedef set<string> guests;
interval_map<time, guests> party;
guests mary; mary.insert("Mary");
guests harry; harry.insert("Harry");
party += make_pair(interval<time>::rightopen(20:00, 22:00),mary);
party += make_pair(interval<time>::rightopen_(21:00, 23:00),harry);
// party now contains
[20:00, 21:00)->{"Mary"}
[21:00, 22:00)->{"Harry","Mary"} //guest sets aggregated on overlap
[22:00, 23:00)->{"Harry"}

As can be seen from the example an interval_map has both a decompositional behavior (on the time dimension) as well as a accumulative one (on the associated values).

Type Traits Extensions

Author:

Frederic Bron
Review Manager:

Needed
Download:

http://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/browser/sandbox/type_traits
Description:

The purpose of the addition is to add type traits to detect if types T and U are comparable in the sense of <, <=, >, >=, == or != operators, i.e. if t<u has a sens when t is of type T and u of type U (same for <=, >, >=, ==, !=).

The following traits are added:

is_equal_to_comparable<T,U> is_greater_comparable<T,U> is_greater_equal_comparable<T,U> is_less_comparable<T,U> is_less_equal_comparable<T,U> is_not_equal_to_comparable<T,U>

The names are based on the corresponding names of the standard template library (<functional> header, section 20.3.3 of the standard).

The code has the following properties: * returns true if t<u is meaningful and returns a value convertible to bool * returns false if t<u is meaningless. * fails with compile time error if t<u is meaningful and returns void (a possibility to avoid compile time error would be to return true with an operator, trick but this has little sens as returning false would be better)

InterThreads

Author:

Vicente J. Botet Escriba
Review Manager:

Needed
Download:

Boost Vault
Description:
Boost.InterThreads extends Boost.Threads adding some features:
  • thread decorator: thread_decorator allows to define setup/cleanup functions which will be called only once by thread: setup before the thread function and cleanup at thread exit.
  • thread specific shared pointer: this is an extension of the thread_specific_ptr providing access to this thread specific context from other threads. As it is shared the stored pointer is a shared_ptr instead of a raw one.
  • thread keep alive mechanism: this mechanism allows to detect threads that do not prove that they are alive by calling to the keep_alive_point regularly. When a thread is declared dead a user provided function is called, which by default will abort the program.
  • thread tuple: defines a thread groupe where the number of threads is know statically and the threads are created at construction time.
  • set_once: a synchonizer that allows to set a variable only once, notifying to the variable value to whatever is waiting for that.
  • thread_tuple_once: an extension of the boost::thread_tuple which allows to join the thread finishing the first, using for that the set_once synchronizer.
  • thread_group_once: an extension of the boost::thread_group which allows to join the thread finishing the first, using for that the set_once synchronizer.

(thread_decorator and thread_specific_shared_ptr) are based on the original implementation of threadalert written by Roland Schwarz.

Boost.InterThreads extends Boost.Threads adding thread setup/cleanup decorator, thread specific shared pointer, thread keep alive mechanism and thread tuples.

Bitfield

Author:

Vicente J. Botet Escriba
Review Manager:

Needed
Download:

http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/bitfield with documentation available at http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/bitfield/libs/integer/doc/index.html
Description:
Portable bitfields traits. Boost.Bitfield consists of:
  • a generic bitfield traits class providing generic getter and setter methods.
  • a BOOST_BITFIELD_DCL macro making easier the definition of the bitfield traits and the bitfield getter and setter functions.

Lockfree

Author:

Tim Blechmann
Review Manager:

Needed
Download:

http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&amp;filename=boost_lockfree-241109.zip&amp;directory=Concurrent%20Programming&amp;
Documentation:

http://tim.klingt.org/boost_lockfree/
Description:

boost.lockfree provides implementations of lock-free data structures. lock-free data structures can be accessed by multiple threads without the necessity of blocking synchronization primitives such as guards. lock-free data structures can be used in real-time systems, where blocking algorithms may lead to high worst-case execution times, to avoid priority inversion, or to increase the scalability for multi-processor machines.

boost.lockfree provides:
  • boost::lockfree::fifo, a lock-free fifo queue
  • boost::lockfree::stack, a lock-free stack
the code is available from from my personal git repository:

Libraries under development

Persistent

Author:

Tim Blechmann
Description:

A library, based on Boost.Serialization, that provides access to persistent objects with an interface as close as possible to accessing regular objects in memory.

  • object ownership concepts equivalent to the ones used by Boost.SmartPtr: shared, weak, scoped (and raw)
  • ACID transactions, including recovery after a crash and "Serializable" isolation level
  • concurrent transactions, nested transactions, distributed transactions
  • concurrent access containers: STL containers whose nodes are implemented as persistent objects and can be accessed without moving the container to memory. Concurrent transactions modifying the container are only repeated in the rare cases the same container node is changed simultanisouly by 2 threads.
  • extensible by other transactional resources, e.g. an object relational mapper based on the upcoming Boost.Rdb library. Multiple resources can be combined to one database, with distributed transactions among them.

Please let us know of any libraries you are currently developing that you intend to submit for review.

See http://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/LibrariesUnderConstruction for a current listing of libraries under development.