SUBMISSION: New Library for kdesupport: indexlib

[David Johnson]

On Thursday 09 June 2005 07:30 am, Luís Pedro Coelho wrote:

> I tried that. The problem is that boost is very intertwined. Pull one
> header and it is very difficult to not pull the whole thing in (about
> 24Mb!). The best I can do is provide a downloadable package with the
> headers only (The dependency is compile-time only: just the headers
> are needed).

The problem I have with boost is that it's not a library so much as an 
eclectic collection of stuff that's on the bleeding edge of advanced 
C++ practice. I don't like "advanced C++" code because it's too hard to 
maintain. It overwhelms new programmers, and intimidates intermediate 
programmers, so that the only people who can work on the code are 
experts.

Other reasons: debugging heavily templated code is nasty; understanding 
error messages from heavily templated code is nearly impossible; I've 
seen no evidence beyond the self-interested advocacy that this stuff 
really will be added to the next standard; boost's heavy intertwining 
of template classes tends to cause much more "bloat" than is normal for 
templated code; and there's little cohesion in the library but a lot of 
coupling, which is the exact opposite of good OO design.

I don't want to sound like a luddite, but sometimes boring is better 
than cutting edge, especially in a common library to be used by those 
who aren't necessarily C++/STL/template gurus.

-- 
David Johnson
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