Christian Mayer wrote: > > "Curtis L. Olson" wrote: > > > > Bernie Bright has submitted a simplified boost distribution for > > SimGear and I have committed it to CVS. The boost web page is here: > > > > http://www.boost.org/ > > > > We will begin depending on this package soon. > > Well, *I* don't really understand what boost is usefull for. > > Can somebody tell me what boost does and why it's important for us, > please?
Boost was begun by members of the C++ Standards Committee Library Working Group, although membership has expanded to include nearly two thousand members of the C++ community at large. Its aim is to develop "existing practice" and provide reference implementations of possible future additions to the C++ Standard Library. Several Boost libraries have already been presented to the library working group and have met with a favorable response (that is, it is quite likely that they will become part of the next C++ standard library). I have asked Curt to include a subset of Boost that includes just Boost.Function and Boost.Bind (plus required support and configuration files). These are all header files so there is nothing to compile. Boost.Function is a family of class templates that implement function objects. It generalises the idea of callback functions such that free functions and member functions are treated identically. This means that anywhere we store a function pointer or an object pointer plus pointer-to-member-function we can store a single boost::function object instead. Boost.Bind is a generalisation of std::bind1st(), std::bind2nd() and std::mem_fun(). It is used in conjunction with Boost.Function to "bind" an object and a pointer to a member function into a single function object. It is a smarter and more elegant replacement for our fg_callback. Boost has a lot to offer if you are doing any serious C++ development. For example smart pointers, a regex library, compile time assertions and threads have all been presented to the committee. Remember, what is in Boost today may appear in the C++ standard tomorrow :) Cheers, Bernie _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
