website2022/development/report-dec-2009.html

---
title: Review Wizard Status Report for December 2009
copyright: 
revised: 
---


Review Wizard Status Report for December 2009



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](http://boost-consulting.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=boost.lexer.zip&directory=Strings%20-%20Text%20Processing) |
| 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](http://www.boost-consulting.com/vault/index.php?&direction=0&order=&directory=Memory) |
| 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](http://tinyurl.com/cm9lum) |
| 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: | 
[Boost Vault](http://www.boost-consulting.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=Pimpl.zip&directory=&)
<http://www.ddj.com/cpp/205918714> (documentation)
 |
| 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](http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&amp;filename=boost-threadpool.2.tar.gz&amp;directory=Concurrent%20Programming) |
| 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](http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&amp;filename=conversion.zip&amp;directory=Utilities&amp;) |
| 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](http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&amp;filename=algorithm_sorting.zip) |
| 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](http://gil-contributions.googlecode.com/files/rc2.zip) |
| 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](http://www.cs.aau.dk/~nesotto/boost/auto_buffer.zip) |
| 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](http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&amp;filename=boost-string-convert.zip) |
| 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](http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&amp;filename=interthreads.zip&amp;directory=Concurrent%20Programming&amp;) |
| 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:
* git://tim.klingt.org/boost\_lockfree.git
* <http://tim.klingt.org/git?p=boost_lockfree.git>
 |


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.