website2022/development/report-may-2008.html

---
title: Review Wizard Status Report for May 2008
copyright: 
revised: 
---


Review Wizard Status Report for May 2008



Review Wizard Status Report for May 2008
========================================

News
----


December 7, 2007 - Forward Library Accepted - Awaiting
 SVN


December 16 - Unordered Containers Library Accepted - In
 SVN


December 21 - Factory Library Accepted - Awaiting SVN


January 13, 2008 - Switch Library Accepted Provisionally -
 Awaiting submission for mini review


January 18 - Singleton Library Rejected - Awaiting
 resubmission, John Torjo has already volunteered to manage the
 next review


January 30 - Flyweight Library Accepted - Awaiting SVN


February 13 - Logging Library Rejected - Awaiting
 resubmission for new review, John Torjo has already resubmitted
 and Gennadiy Rozental has again volunteered to manage the
 review


February 27 - Floating Point Utilities Library Accepted -
 Awaiting SVN


March 14 - Proto Library Accepted - Exists as a component in
 Xpressive, but not yet as a separate library


April 20 - Egg review completed - Results pending


May 7 - Scope Exit Library Accepted - Awaiting SVN

Older
 Issues
=============


The binary\_int library, accepted in October 2005 has not yet
 been submitted to SVN. The authors are strongly encouraged to
 contact the review wizards


The Quantitative Units library, accepted in April 2007 has
 not yet been submitted to SVN


The Globally Unique Identifier library, accepted
 provisionally in May 2007 has not yet been submitted for
 mini-review and full acceptance


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


The Accumulators library, accepted in February 2007 is in
 SVN


The Exception library, accepted in October 2007 is in
 SVN


The Scope Exit review report had not been submitted by the
 review manager. John Phillips stepped in as substitute review
 manager and produced a report


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. Also notice that the review
 process page has been updated with a section on rights and
 responsibilities of library submitters.


For the Scope Exit review, we would like to publicly
 apologize to Alexander Nasonov for how long this has languished
 without a report. The review wizards will work to make sure
 this doesn't happen any more.

General Announcements
=====================


As always, we need experienced review managers. In the past
 few months there have been a large number of reviews, but the
 flow of high quality submissions is just as big, 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 cs dot indiana dot edu" and "phillips at
 mps dot ohio-state dot edu" respectively.


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.

Review
 Queue
=============


* Finite State Machines
* Property Map (fast-track)
* Graph (fast-track)
* Lexer
* Thread-Safe Signals
* Boost.Range (Update)
* Shifted Pointer
* DataFlow Signals
* Logging
* Futures (Braddock Gaskill)
* Futures (Anthony Williams)
* Join (Yigong Liu)
* Pimpl (Vladimir Batov)

---
Finite State Machines
---------------------


| Author: | Andrey Semashev |
| Review Manager: | Martin Vuille |
| Download: | [Boost Sandbox
 Vault](http://tinyurl.com/yjozfn) |
| Description: | The Boost.FSM library is an
 implementation of FSM (stands for Finite State
 Machine) programming concept. The main goals of the
 library are:* Simplicity. It should be very simple to create
 state machines using this library.
* Performance. The state machine infrastructure
 should not be very time and memory-consuming in
 order to be applicable in more use cases.
* Extensibility. A developer may want to add more
 states to an existing state machine. A developer
 should also be able to specify additional
 transitions and events for the machine with minimum
 modifications to the existing code.
 |

Property Map (fast-track)
-------------------------


| Author: | Andrew Sutton |
| Review Manager: | Jeremy Siek |
| Download: | <http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/graph-v2> |
| Description: | A number of additions and
 modifications to the Property Map Library,
 including:* A constant-valued property map, useful for
 naturally unweighted graphs.
* A noop-writing property map, useful when you
 have to provide an argument, but just don't care
 about the output.
* See [ChangeLog](http://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/browser/sandbox/graph-v2/libs/property_map/ChangeLog) for details.
 |

Graph
 (fast-track)
-------------------


| Author: | Andrew Sutton |
| Review Manager: | Jeremy Siek |
| Download: | <http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/graph-v2> |
| Description: | A number of additions and
 modifications to the Graph Library, including:* Two new graph classes (undirected and directed)
 which are intended to make the library more
 approachable for new developers
* A suite of graph measures including degree and
 closeness centrality, mean geodesic distance,
 eccentricity, and clustering coefficients.
* An algorithm for visiting all cycles in a
 directed graph (Tiernan's from 1970ish). It works
 for undirected graphs too, but reports cycles twice
 (one for each direction).
* An algorithm for visiting all the cliques a
 graph (Bron&Kerbosch). Works for both directed
 and undirected.
* Derived graph measures radius and diameter
 (from eccentricity) and girth and circumference
 (from Tiernan), and clique number (from
 Bron&Kerbosch).
* An exterior\_property class that helps hides
 some of the weirdness with exterior
 properties.
* run-time and compile-time tests for the new
 algorithms.
* a substantial amount of documentation
* Graph cores, implemented by David Gleich
 (@Stanford University)
* Deterministic graph generators - capable of
 creating or inducing specific types of graphs over
 a vertex set (e.g., star graph, wheel graph, prism
 graph, etc). There are several other specific types
 that could be added to this, but I haven't had the
 time just yet.
 |

Lexer
-----


| Author: | Ben Hanson |
| Review Manager: | Eric Neibler |
| Download: | [Boost Sandbox 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. |

Thread-Safe Signals
-------------------


| Author: | Frank Hess |
| Review Manager: | Need Volunteer |
| Download: | [Boost Sandbox Vault](http://www.boost-consulting.com/vault/index.php?&direction=0&order=&directory=thread_safe_signals) |
| Description: | A thread-safe implementation of
 Boost.Signals that has some interface changes to
 accommodate thread safety, mostly with respect to
 automatic connection management. |

Boost.Range (Update)
--------------------


| Author: | Neil Groves |
| Review Manager: | Needed |
| Download: | [Boost Sandbox Vault](http://www.boost-consulting.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=range_ex.zip&directory=) |
| Description: | A significant update of the
 range library, including range adapters. |

Shifted
 Pointer
----------------


| Author: | Phil Bouchard |
| Review Manager: | Needed |
| Download: | [Boost Sandbox 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. |

DataFlow
 Signals
-----------------


| Author: | Stjepan Rajko |
| Review Manager: | Needed |
| Download: | <http://dancinghacker.com/code/dataflow/> |
| Description: | Dataflow is a generic library
 for dataflow programming. Dataflow programs can
 typically be expressed as a graph in which vertices
 represent components that process data, and edges
 represent the flow of data between the components. As
 such, dataflow programs can be easily reconfigured by
 changing the components and/or the connections. |

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! |

Futures
-------


| Author: | Braddock Gaskill |
| Review Manager: | Needed |
| Download: | <http://braddock.com/~braddock/future/> |
| Description: | The goal of the boost.future
 library is to provide a definitive future
 implementation with the best features of the numerous
 implementations, proposals, and academic papers
 floating around, in the hopes to avoid multiple
 incompatible future implementations in libraries of
 related concepts (coroutines, active objects, asio,
 etc). This library hopes to explore the combined
 implementation of the best future concepts. |

Futures
-------


| Author: | Anthony Williams |
| Review Manager: | Needed |
| Download: | <http://www.justsoftwaresolutions.co.uk/files/n2561_future.hpp>
 (code) <http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2008/n2561.html>
 (description) |
| Description: | This paper proposes a kind of return
 buffer that takes a value (or an exception) in one
 (sub-)thread and provides the value in another
 (controlling) thread. This buffer provides
 essentially two interfaces:

* an interface to assign a value as class
 promise and
* an interface to wait for, query and retrieve
 the value (or exception) from the buffer as
 classes unique\_future and shared\_future. While a
 unique\_future provides move semantics where the
 value (or exception) can be retrieved only once,
 the shared\_future provides copy semantics where
 the value can be retrieved arbitrarily
 often.
A typical procedure for working with promises and
 futures looks like:

* control thread creates a promise,
* control thread gets associated future from
 promise,
* control thread starts sub-thread,
* sub-thread calls actual function and assigns
 the return value to the promise,
* control thread waits for future to become
 ready,
* control thread retrieves value from
 future.
Also proposed is a packaged\_task that wraps one
 callable object and provides another one that can be
 started in its own thread and assigns the return
 value (or exception) to a return buffer that can be
 accessed through one of the future classes.
With a packaged\_task a typical procedure looks
 like:

* control thread creates a packaged\_task with a
 callable object,
* control thread gets associated future from
 packaged\_task,
* control thread starts sub-thread, which
 invokes the packaged\_task,
* packaged\_task calls the callable function and
 assigns the return value,
* control thread waits for future to become
 ready,
* control thread retrieves value from
 future.


 |


Notice that we are in the unusual position of having two
 very different libraries with the same goal in the queue at
 the same time. The Review Wizards would appreciate a
 discussion of the best way to hold these two reviews to
 produce the best possible addition to Boost.

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 Sandbox 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. |


Libraries under
 development
============================


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