[boost] Review Wizard Report for November 2012

[Ronald Garcia]

==============================================
Review Wizard Status Report for November 2012
==============================================

News
====

1. ODEInt Reviewed

2. Boost 1.52.0 Released. No New Libraries.

Open Issues
===========

The following libraries have review managers, but have not yet been
scheduled for review:

* Range Extensions - added May 2012; review manager: Neil Groves.

The following libraries have been reviewed and await reports from their
review managers:

* Predef - reviewed February 2012; review manager: Joel Falcou.
* Coroutine - reviewed September 2012; review manager: Hartmut Kaiser.


The following libraries have been accepted to Boost, but have not yet
been submitted to SVN:

* Constrained Value - accepted September 2010; author: Robert Kawulak.
* GIL.IO - accepted January 2011; author: Christian Henning.
* Contract - accepted September 2012; author: Lorenzo Caminiti.

The following libraries have been accepted and submitted to SVN, but
have not yet appeared in a release:

* Atomic - accepted July 2011; author Helge Bahmann.
* Type Traits Introspection - accepted August 2011; author: Edward Diener.
* Lockfree - accepted August 2011; author: Tim Blechmann.

The following libraries have been accepted provisionally to Boost, but
have not been submitted for mini-review and full acceptance:

* Endian - accepted provisionally November 2011; author: Beman Dawes.
* Log - accepted provisionally March 2010; author: Andrey Semashev.



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

As always, we need experienced review managers. 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, including library contributors, infrastructure
contributors, and other mailing list participants with a substantial
track record of constructive participation. If you can serve as review
manager for any of them, email Ron Garcia or John Phillips, "rxg at cs
dot cmu dot edu" and "phillips at pacific dot 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. If you are interested in reviewing a library but
won't have time during the review period, you can always prepare your
review ahead of time. 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, please
email Ron or John.

The review schedule is an unordered list of the libraries awaiting
review. As such, any library on the schedule can be reviewed once the
developer is ready, a review manager has been secured, and
the manager, developer, and wizards agree on a date
to schedule the review.


Review Schedule
===============

* Join (M)
* Pimpl (M)
* Sorting (M)
* Quaternions, Vectors, Matrices (M)
* Variadic Macro Data (M)
* Block Pointer (M)
* Singularity (M)
* Extended Complex Numbers (M)
* Metaparse (M)
* Polygon: Voronoi Extensions
* Coroutine
* Range Extensions
* Nowide (M)
* Array (M)
* TypeIndex (M)
* STL Extensions (M)

``(M)`` marks libraries that need review managers.

--------------------




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: https://github.com/boost-vault/Miscellaneous/blob/master/Pimpl.zip

: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.


Sorting
-------
:Author: Steven Ross

:Review Manager: Needed

:Download: https://github.com/boost-vault/Sorting

: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 2X as fast as std::sort, depending on processor,
compiler optimizations, and data distribution. float_sort is roughly
70% faster than std::sort. string_sort is roughly 2X
as fast as std::sort.


Quaternions, Vectors, Matrices
------------------------------
:Author: Emil Dotchevski

:Review Manager: Needed

:Download: http://www.revergestudios.com/boost-qvm/

:Description:
QVM defines a set of generic functions and operator overloads for
working with quaternions, vectors and matrices of static size. The
library also defines vector and matrix data types, however it allows
users to introduce their own types by specializing the q_traits,
v_traits and m_traits templates.


Variadic Macro Data
-------------------
:Author: Edward Diener

:Review Manager: Needed

:Download: `Boost Sandbox <http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/variadic_macro_data/>`__

:Description:
This library adds support and functionality for variadic macros to
Boost as well as integrating variadic macros with the Boost PP
library without changing the latter library in any way.


Block Pointer
-------------
:Author: Phil Bouchard

:Review Manager: Needed

:Download: https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/block_ptr/

:Description:
Deterministic memory manager of constant complexity capable of
handling cyclic collections.



Singularity
-----------
:Author: Ben Robinson

:Review Manager: Needed

:Download: https://github.com/cppmaven/Singularity

:Description: The Singularity Design Pattern allows you to restrict
any class to a single instance. Unlike the infamous Singleton,
Singularity gives you direct control over the lifetime of the object,
does not require you to grant global access to the object, nor does it
limit you to the default constructor for that object.


Extended Complex Numbers
------------------------
:Author: Matthieu Schaller

:Review Manager: Needed

:Download: http://code.google.com/p/cpp-imaginary-numbers/

:Description:
The library is an extension of the std::complex class addressing two issues:

1. The standard does not guaranty the behaviour of the complex class if
instantiated with types other than float/double/long double.

2. Some calculation where pure imaginary numbers (i.e. multiples of
sqrt(-1)) appear are unnecessarily slowed down due to the lack of
support for these numbers. The code I submit contains two
interleaved classes boost::complex and boost::imaginary which can
be instantiated with any type T provided T overloads the usual
arithmetic operators and some basic (real) mathematical functions
depending on which complex function will be used. It is thus an
extended version of Thorsten Ottosen's n1869 proposal
(http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers/2005/n1869.html)



Metaparse
---------
:Author: Abel Sinkovics

:Review Manager: Needed

:Download: http://abel.web.elte.hu/metaparse/metaparse.zip

:Description:

Metaparse is a library for constructing parsers parsing at
compile-time based on template metaprogramming. The parsers built with
the library take boost::mpl::strings as input and can produce

- types
- objects (types with public static members)
- callable C++ functions (types with public static method)
- template metafunction classes

as output (based on the input being parsed).

On compilers supporting constexpr the library provides the following
syntactic sugar for writing the input of the parsers:

BOOST_STRING("this is a string")

The library can be used for implementing DSLs in C++, including DSLs
making C++ template metaprogramming easier (see examples).


Polygon: Voronoi Extensions
---------------------------
:Author: Andril Sydorchuk

:Review Manager: Lucanus Simonson

:Download: http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/gtl/


:Description:
This library extends Boost.Polygon with the following features:
- Robust and efficient implementation of the sweepline algorithm that
allows to construct Voronoi diagram, Delaunay triangulation and medial axis
of a set of points and line segments.
- Coordinates of the output geometries are computed within the 64 machine
epsilon relative error (6 mantissa bits).
- Voronoi diagram data structure that allows efficient traversal and data
association with the output Voronoi graph.
- No 3rd party dependencies (e.g. GMP, MPFR), all the required multiple
precision types are implemented as part of the library.
- The input and output coordinate type domains are configurable via
coordinate type traits, thus allowing to compute coordinates of the Voronoi
vertices within any required precision.
- The full construction of the Voronoi diagram of 100 000 points takes only
0.27 seconds (see benchmarks).


Coroutine
---------
:Author: Oliver Kowalke

:Review Manager: Hartmut Kaiser

:Download: http://gitorious.org/boost-dev/boost-dev/archive-tarball/coroutine

:Description:
This library is an implementation of coroutines and generators using
Boost.Context.


Range Extensions
----------------
:Author: Akira Takahashi

:Review Manager: Neil Groves

:Download: https://github.com/faithandbrave/OvenToBoost


:Description:
This project adds some features of the Oven Range Library to Boost.Range.
Features:
- Additional Range Adaptors (taken, taken_while, dropped,
dropped_while, elements, elements_key, memoized, outdirected)
- Extensions for using Lambda (regular function, regular operator)
- Infinite Range (iteration function)
- and additional range utilities.

Nowide
------
:Author: Artyom Beilis

:Review Manager: Needed

:Download: http://cppcms.com/files/nowide/

:Description:
This library makes cross platform Unicode aware programming easier.
It provides an implementation of standard C and C++ library functions,
such that their inputs are UTF-8 aware on Windows without requiring to
use Wide API.


Array
-----
:Author: Brian Smith

:Review Manager: Needed

:Download: https://github.com/BrianJSmith/Array

:Description:
The array class is a C++11 compatible implementation of static
multidimensional arrays.


TypeIndex
---------
:Author: Antony Polukhin

:Review Manager: Needed

:Download: https://github.com/apolukhin/type_index

:Description:
TypeIndex is an extended C++11 type_index library, that

* works with disabled RTTI
* can store const-volatile-reference info about types (if user requested it)
* has all the functionality of std::type_index
* has portable across compilers and platforms functionality for
getting demangled type names
* works across modules/shared libraries
* does not require C++11 to work


STL Extensions
--------------
:Author: Vadim Stadnik

:Review Manager: Needed

:Download: https://github.com/vstadnik/stl_ext_adv_review

:Description:
The proposed library [stl_ext_adv] offers augmented array based B+ trees
and STL containers that support the interfaces of the C++03 sequences
and associative containers. The library offers a number of extensions
and performance improvements that are not available in
C++03 and C++11 standard containers.



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

See http://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/LibrariesUnderConstruction
for a current listing of libraries under development.


_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost

[Christopher Kormanyos]

<snip>

> The following libraries have been accepted to Boost, but have not yet

> been submitted to SVN:

<snip>

There's Multiprecision as well, unless I missed it in the list.

Thank you for the excellent update!

Best regards, Chris.

<snip>

[Ronald Garcia]

Thank you for catching that Chris.

Best,
Ron

[Francisco José Tapia]

Hi Ronald

The 3 of October I sent a message requesting the Formal Review of the
library Countertree. I don't know if this is sufficient for to request a
Formal Review. If not, please, say me, in order to to do it.

That message contains a brief description of the project. The code and the
documentation are located in my dropbox, because when I had lost the
password of the vault. But if it is necessary I will put there.

Project location ( zip file with code and documentation) :
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8437476/works/countertree_code_doc.zip

Online documentation with code download :
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8437476/works/countertree/index.html

I would know if you have any time estimation about the beginning of the
review. I ask you because, in the Countertree library the logical expansion
is the concurrent version. This is important because many libraries like
the Threading Building Blocks have concurrent data structures, but don't
have concurrent data structures based on trees ( set, multiset, map and
multimap), due to the difficulty of to distribute the elements stored
between an arbitrary number of threads. With the countertree is easy
because you can use like a vector.

Depending of the time estimation, if close, I will do more quietly and I
can be a reviewer of some library, if not I will tray to finish the
concurrent part for the review.

Regards

Francisco Tapia


2012/11/12 Ronald Garcia <r...@cs.cmu.edu>

[Ronald Garcia]

Hello Francisco,

Thank you for your note. Could you forward me a copy of the October 3 note, because I do not have a copy.
Also, I cannot estimate the time when the review will happen. You will need to find a review manager first and then schedule the review, so the time until the review could vary greatly. Ultimately it is up to you whether you would like to continue working or prepare for review now.

Best,
Ron

[Francisco José Tapia]

Hi , Ron

I send you a copy of the message.

I supouse I will have time for the two thinks and . I will examine the
projects for review in order to be reviewer of someone

Thanks

Francisco


Hi all,
I would like to request a formal review of the library “Countertree +
Suballocator” [countertree]

Project location ( zip file with code and documentation) :
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8437476/works/countertree_code_doc.zip

Quick view of documentation with code download :
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8437476/works/countertree/index.html

For the people who don't know this project, this is a description :

*COUNTERTREE*

This library is an implementation of a binary red-black counter tree. This
tree have an additional counter in each leaf. This permit the access to the
elements by the position, like in a vector. It is a random access container
with random access iterators . Based on this tree we have :


- With unordered information we have vectors (countertree::vector_tree)
with identical interface than std::vector. The vector_tree have the same
speed inserting and deleting in any position (all the operations are O(log
N)).It is slower than std:vector inserting and deleting at end, but much
faster for to insert and delete in any other position.
- With ordered information, we have in the countertree namespace the
classes set, multiset, map and multimap, with identical interface than the
STL classes, with the plus of access to the elements by position, like in a
vector. The iterators are random access , and you can subtract two
iterators in a O(log N) time for to know the number of nodes between them
(even with the end( ) and rend( ) iterators)

*SUBALLOCATOR*

In the allocation of equal size elements ( as in STL list, set,
multiset,map and multimap), when the number of elements grows, many
allocators begin to have speed problems. For to improve the speed, many
allocators request to the Operating System big chucks of memory ( pool
allocators). With this, the allocator don't need request memory to the
operating system for each allocation. But many allocators don't return well
the unused chucks of memory to the Operating System and the memory used by
the allocator is the maximum used, never decrease .

The *suballocator is a solution to these problems*, and others memory
problems described in the suballocator page. The suballocator is a layer
between the allocator and the data structures, compatible with any
allocator with the STL definition. The suballocator request memory to the
allocator, and return to it when unused. The suballocator replace to the
allocator in the allocation of equal size elements

With the suballocator

a) *We have a very fast allocation* *(around 2 times faster than the
std::allocator of GCC 4.7, CLANG 3.0 and 3 times than Visual Studio 10 *See
details in the *Suballocator Benchmark*)*
b) *Return the suballocator return memory to the allocator, this can use in
the allocation of others types of data or for return to the *Operating
System, decreasing the memory used by the program, *( as you can see in the
*Suballocator Benchmark *)*
c) *You can use with any allocator if it is according with the STL
definition*. The suballocator provides speed and memory management to any
allocator.

d) Even the time of the allocation is a small part of the time spent in the
insertion in a std::set, the suballocator obtain time reductions over over
the 30% respect the std::allocator. The secret is the cache performance due
to the data locality improvement.

*COUNTERTREE + SUBALLOCATOR*

The join of the two ideas provide us data structures with a suballocator
built-in. They are, in the namespace countertree, the vector_tree_pool,
set_pool, multiset_pool,map_pool and multimap_pool, with identical
interface than the STL classes but better performance for big number of
elements

It is fast, useful and easy to understand and use,. They are the like the
STL classes with a few additional functions.

This library is designed thinking in programmers with a basic knowledge of
C++. As I say in the documentation, if you know the STL classes vector, set
, multiset, map , multimap and allocator, you know more than 95% needed for
to use this library.

I showed the library to several friends and colleagues, and one of them
said me “If your potential users are not experts, and they need more than 5
minutes to understand what's the goal of the library and what they can do
with it, many of them leave the page.... , and the library”.

The first page of the documentation explain the library, the reasons and
what can do. And in the next pages show the details and how can do in a a
easy way.

I had checked this code with GCC 4.7 , CLANG/LLVM 3.0 and Visual C++ 10 (
all with 32 and 64bits.). In code of the project is composed by the code of
the classes, the test programs, the benchmarks programs used and mentioned
in the documentation, and several examples of the code

I had checked all the requirements for to request the review. But I am not
sure if all is OK. If you miss something or something is wrong , please ,
mail me and I will correct as soon as possible


Sincerely yours

Francisco Tapia

fjt...@gmail.com


2012/11/16 Ronald Garcia <r...@cs.cmu.edu>

[Ronald Garcia]

Thanks Francisco. I have added Countertree to the review schedule.

Best,
Ron

[Francisco José Tapia]

Thanks Ron.

I am sorry because I didn't thought about the resume of the project. It's
too long, it's like a novel !

I will write a short description and I will send you in a few days.

Thanks

Francisco


2012/11/16 Ronald Garcia <r...@cs.cmu.edu>

[Ronald Garcia]

Thank you Francisco. Also, please cc: me directly on it so it doesn't slip past

Best,
Ron