Re: Which libraries in Boost are mature enough to be used in real applications?
David Abrahams wrote:
Wil Evers <bouncer@dev.null> writes:
So I think I'll stick with the advice I tried to give to the
original poster: before deciding to use a third party
library, either from Boost or anywhere else, test it. With
all target compilers, and on all target platforms.
I think that's great advice, with one caveat: if your compiler
and platform already appears in our regression test tables,
you probably don't need to run your own tests.
For Boost specificly, and even then, I'd be sceptical. Maybe
its because I'd worked a lot on more less critical systems, but
the rule is to never use any tool without testing it first. We
test every new version of the compiler, with our own code -- who
cares if it works for the vendors test suite, if it doesn't work
with our existing code. And I would certainly recommend that we
write a test suite for any library we use, including Boost,
which tests the features we want to use, in the way we want to
use them.
Practically speaking, with any non-trivial tool, the number of
combinations of ways of using it is simply too large for the
vendor to have tested them all. The usual procedure, at the
vendor level, is to test each feature separately, and to count
on code review, etc., to ensure that the features don't interact
in ways that introduce bugs. And to be frank, I've yet to find
a third party tool of any sort which was completely free of
bugs. Testing it with something that simulates the actual use
we are considering is still the only solution to be even a
little bit sure, and testing each new version with existing
code, once we are using it, is even better -- no test can ever
be 100% comprehensive, but our existing code does cover all of
the cases we are already using.
(Having said that: of all of the third party software I've seen,
Boost is probably the best -- not just because of the tests, but
because of the extensive code review it undergoes.)
--
James Kanze GABI Software
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