[Boost-users] [xint] Boost.XInt formal review
Vladimir Prus
the formal review of the Boost.XInt library, by Chad Nelson, starts now and will
run through March 11.
The documentation for the current version is available at:
http://www.oakcircle.com/xint_docs/
The source code is available via Subversion at:
http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/xint
or can be downloaded at:
http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=xint.zip
Here are the important points:
1. All comments are appreciated. Even if you don't have the time for in-depth study
of everything, comments on parts of the library are welcome. In particular, if you
are already using logging in your applications and have specialized requirements,
you might want to directly check how the proposed library handles them.
2. The reviews and all comments should be submitted to the developers list,
bo...@lists.boost.org and the email should have "[xint]" prefix in the subject
to make sure it's not missed. The deadline for reviews is
23:59, March 11, PST, or
2:59, March 12, EST, or
7:59 March 12, UK time,
10:59, March 12 MSK
3. Please explicitly state in your review whether the library should be accepted.
4. The general review checklist is provided below:
- What is your evaluation of the design?
- What is your evaluation of the implementation?
- What is your evaluation of the documentation?
- What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library?
- Did you try to use the library? With what compiler? Did you have any
problems?
- How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A quick
reading? In-depth study?
- Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain?
Thanks,
Volodya
--
Vladimir Prus
Mentor Graphics
+7 (812) 677-68-40
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Christopher Jefferson
The library has a small problem which prevents it compiling with clang (and possibly other compilers). I in no way view this as a serious issue, as getting code to work with many compilers is always a problem.
On lines 85 and 89 of boost/xint/integer.hpp, remove the 'typename'.
After this fix, I briefly used the library and used the documentation. It is indeed a large number library, I wrote some short programs and they worked well.
I congratulate the author on making the easy uses of xint easy. I am sure others will comment on the advanced features of the library, but I am very happy to finally have a library where I can just declare a boost::xint::integer, and then have all normal operations work as I would expect, with no need for boiler-plate code.
I also tried writing some incorrect code, and the error messages are clear and short, which is nice to see.
I agree with the overall design decision chosen for thread-safety, and believe the system correctly balances clarity and efficiency.
>From my brief review as a user, I believe this library should be accepted.
One serious (but small) issue which will have to be addressed before the library is accepted.
The 'secure' flag at the moment I believe cannot be trusted to work. Compilers can, and do, optimise out memset if it can prove the memory will not be changed again.
There are various solutions to this, I would probably suggest putting a "secure memset" into boost/detail so it can be used by other libraries, and specialised for different systems.
See Microsoft's discussion of the issue here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972826.aspx
The short answer is:
on Windows wrap the memset in:
#pragma optimize("", off)
#pragma optimize("", on)
On linux, write a "stupid" memset which uses volatile pointers to force the code to be executed.
I am happy to help clean this up, and produce a general solution, if required.
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