Remove external dependencies

[rhyolight]

Currently boost and apr. Let's discuss how we should deal with removing these.

[sjmackenzie]

apr
boost
yaml-cpp
zlib
cycle_counter.hpp (easy to bring this into NuPIC) (as Subutai mentioned)

What usage do these play? How essential are they?

[subutai]

apr - nupic uses it for low level stuff like directory/file parsing, environment variables, timers, etc. NuPIC has an OS module containing os dependent code, and most of the usage of apr is there.

boost - looking through it, a bunch of the files that use boost are obsolete and can be removed. After that are some places which use shared_ptr, something called BOOST_CLASS_REQUIRE, and scoped_array. Looks like we use some of the math functions as well.

yaml - YAML is used for the high level description of a network for serialization. (Not the synaptic weights, etc. just the high level description.)

zlib - not too sure really. It's there and it looks nupic uses it to provide a compressed I/O stream.

[rhyolight]

No has mentioned this in years.