What is Boost missing?

Question

After spending most of my waking time on Stack Overflow, for better or for worse, I've come to notice how 99% of the C++ questions are answered with "use boost::wealreadysolvedyourproblem", but there must definitely be a few areas Boost doesn't cover, but would be better if it did.

So what features is Boost missing?

I'll start by saying:

• boost::sql (although SOCI should try to become a legal part of boost)
• boost::json (although TinyJSON should try to become a legal part of boost)
• boost::audio (no idea about a good boost-like C++ library)

---

PS: The purpose is to compile a reasonable list, and hopefully Boost-like solutions out there that aren't yet a part of Boost, so no silly stuff like boost::turkey please.

Answer 1

boost::gui would be a nice addition.

Answer 2

Fixed size strings.

Answer 3

Well, I don't keep my expectations high, but boost::callstack would be nice (or maybe it should be boost::debug::callstack). I mean, on most platforms (compilers) the callstack info could be easily retrieved - it would be nice to have one api, that would work on all platforms.

Answer 4

boost::stl, seriously, something along the lines of the EASTL. A fast, efficient STL implementation which gets rid of the legacy problems. There has been some discussion at the Boost mailing list about new IOStreams, which would be byte oriented (and not character oriented!), things like that should really be done.

Besides that, it would be nice if a XML library like TinyXML would get into Boost. And give me a good string library which works by default with UTF-8 strings.

Finally, concurrency stuff in spirit of the TBB. We already see GCC implementing parallel_for (parallel mode), Microsoft is coming next -- obviously, this is something that should get standardized.

Answer 5

boost::concurency, like mentioned above, may contain lock free data structures, atomic operations, different usermode synchronization objects(spin locks) and so on.

Answer 6

Is there a boost::xml? If not then TinyXML should be adopted. :)

Answer 7

Cross-Platform, high performance timing. The microsecond timer doesn't work on windows (it will not throw errors, but is highly discontinuous).

Answer 8

I'd like to see more high-level language interfaces like the existing boost::python.

boost::ruby maybe?

Answer 9

boost::os to query and interact with the machines enviroment, settings and performance info in a standardized C++ fashion. And it would probably provide other c-posix capabilities missing from C++.

Also boost::url would be nice (probably a cUrl wrapper)

Answer 10

a boost::archive to directly manipulate .zip, .tar, .rar, etc. files would be useful.

Answer 11

How about a good arbitrary precision float (or int) data type. Sometimes you want to carry around a number with super high precision (like calculating pi).

Answer 12

A thread pool.

Answer 13

A boost::log library is my vote. For logging messages, not logarithms, silly.

Answer 14

Boost RPC.

Something that connects the boost network/IPC-functionality with the serialization features to make it possible to call functions on processes remotely in some fancy type safe way.

It should preferably be cross platform (no endian problems), floating point compatible, and string encoding agnostic.

Answer 15

boost::artificial_intelligence

Answer 16

boost::atomic

Answer 17

A checksum/hashing library. The CRC-library is nice, but md5 or sha would be useful as well.

Answer 18

How about Boost::MQ. A message queue to augment Boost::ASIO

Answer 19

Boost::time

I hate the cstdlib time.h, simply because it makes me hack out how long my program is taking.

Answer 20

boost::coroutines

Why not have a call tree or even a call graph instead of a dull call stack?

Answer 21

From what I can tell boost stays away from specific standards. Whereas you might expect that it could have a DOM library, it might not be specific to XML or JSON.

Anything touching hardware would be right out. Anything touching specific standards is out. Anything platform specific is out (unless it can clearly be made to be non-specific). Anything requiring other libraries is out.

You dont find boost gzip or boost png, because again too specific. Nor audio or GUI stuff because they touch hardware/platform/other libs.

Basically anything that could be a moving target is out.

Good candidates for boost libs would be very generic concepts that can be improved until there is no reason to modify it again except to fix bugs.

Answer 22

boost::reflection, boost::eval, boost::emit, and boost::compile.

Answer 23

boost::encoding would be nice. A library to be able to convert between different character encodings.

Answer 24

I'd like to see something like the SafeInt library in boost.

It can catch integer overflow and casting problems at runtime.

Answer 25

I would definitely be interested in a Boost.Sql library.

However, I think to really be interesting, one should up the bar (in term of interface) from the SOCI interface you mentioned.

Here is the kind of thing I'd like to write:

DEFINE_TABLE(
  myTable,
  ((id, Int, NotNull))
  ((name, VarChar2<56>, NotNull))
  ((firstName, VarChar2<64>, Null)),
  (PrimaryKey)(id)(name)
);

And then:

auto aQuery = Select(myTable.id, myTable.name).From(myTable).Where(myTable.firstName != Null);

auto aCursor = Cursor(aQuery);

std::list< std::pair<int,std::string> > aList;
while(aCursor.fetch())
{
  aList.insert(std::make_pair(aCursor.get(myTable.id), aCursor.get(myTable.name)));
}

I am definitely waiting for the auto keyword of course, since this implies a high degree of template meta-programming, but I do love DSELs and compile-time checking of the validity of a sql request with "natural" syntax would be a huge boon!

Answer 26

Boost.Unicode. Unicode is such a core component in many technologies desired above/below*: XML, GUIs, etc. Its existence would provide a much needed stepping stone.

*delete as appropriate.

Answer 27

Regarding boost::sql proposal, there is some work in progress:

• On BoostCon'09 Jeff Garland led workshop: Library in Week 2009 to discuss the std::rdb propsals, here are materials std::rdb (.tgz package)
• std_rdb - Boost sister mailing list to discuss standard rdb proposal(s)
• SOCI has been discussed in frame of the std::rdb mailing list and the workshop

Answer 28

I hope you will find this link Libraries Under Construction useful.

Please let me know if you want I add some wish libraries to it by adding a comment to this answer, or posting on the Boost ML.

Answer 29

boost::cryptography, including a wide set of security related algorithms, similar to Crypto++. As I often write networked applications that need different kinds of security on application level, I would love this feature to be present in boost. There are some libs around (I mostly use crpyto++) but having it clearly licensed in the boost library would be very helpful.

Answer 30

A logic programming library including unification and backtracking.

Answer 31

ObjectRole a library that helps to implement the Object Role pattern.

Answer 32

The scoped_guard as included on the detail directory of Boost.MultiIndex

Answer 33

Boost.Persistent able to manage with objects stored on a persistent storage

Answer 34

Arrays indexed by enums

Answer 35

EnumSet similar to bitset but with enum indexes.

Answer 36

Boost.Quartet Quartet are half an octet, i.e. 4 bits taking values from 0..15, and usually represented by chars '0'-'9' 'A'-'F'. There are some container specializations as std::string, std::vector and boost::array that could be of interest to some applications. They are also used when a decimal number is encoded using the BCD format (binary coded decimal) or to encode telephone numbers.

Answer 37

Boost.Singleton

Answer 38

Boost.BloomFilters

Answer 39

Boost.Dataflow

Answer 40

Unique identifier : Use to create unique identifiers for example in database tables, network messages session identifiers, transactions identifiers.

Answer 41

Monotonic allocators.

Answer 42

Formatted container output: Simple and uniform display mechanism for arbitrary ordered lists

Answer 43

Boost.Tree: divers tree implementations and hierarchical iteration

Answer 44

boost::persistent_collections ⇒ A Persistent Collections Library.

Answer 45

I would like much some boost::gpu to abstract call to layers like cuda or openCL with nice syntaxic sugar. I can't believe software vendors are actually providing their own compilers (nvcc for cuda) for that purpose.

Answer 46

config files support with reading and writing

I used boost:program_options to read config files and there is some unkept promises. My point is that boost::po supports a kind of unification between command line option and config files parsers, but for config files what is available fall short : only one supported format similar to old windows ini files.

But my biggest regret is definitely that boost::po has not the slighlest hint of a write support for config files.

Answer 47

How about Boost::Network for items like SMTP, FTP, HTTP protocol handlers etc.

Answer 48

boost::unique_ptr. The one in Boost.Interprocess needs to put into Boost.SmartPtr so that anyone may use it (without having to depend on Interprocess).

Answer 49

regarding boost::sql there is Wt dbo although it is more like hibernate

Answer 50

1. WS-I (SOAP based web services) support.
2. How about image/ voice processing?

Answer 51

boost::extensions for adding scripting support to your application. You'd have boost::extensions::scheme, boost::extensions::python, boost::extensions::ruby and boost::extensions::lua etc.

Kind of like guile.

Answer 52

boost::magic_button

You simply add a magic button to your program, and it does everything.

Answer 53

I second that a thread pool would be nice.

Answer 54

boost::video : sort of like directshow/vmr