Boost is just great and free ... Is there a catch?

Question

The reason for this, I find myself being asked to make replacement classes for boost's classes in a commercial project. And I am asked to test them against the boost class's behaviour.

This makes absolutely no sense to me. I seldom see a license as open as boost's.

Maybe there will be added functionality in the future, but since boost's classes are quite extensible, I really am ... flabbergasted?

Added: I am about to advise my employer against doing this, but I wanted to do this in an informed way.

Edit: clarification. They only asked me for a few classes. Remaking boost seems not to be the intention, but some selective parts of it. Still. I see no reason.

EDIT: Well, 2 meetings afterward, I think I know what the problems are. (I only work as a freelancer so I am not briefed in every detail) It is really a mixture of distrust towards externally and not commercially supported libraries, unwieldiness/overcomplexity of boost if you aren't really proficient, project bloat and some bad experiences with not fully compliant compilers for embedded devices, that may be targeted in the future.

They want something they can fumble around in, without being template maniacs. I am aware that there may be some other libs out there, and I will surely be able to borrow some OS code, but alea iacta est

Well, let there be yet another xplatform utility class framework :) Sometimes reinventing wheels is fun.

Thanks for all your hints. Some of them where quite on the spot, but I think It's fair, that I will not choose one of them as correct. I have given +1 to everybody who contributed to my thought processes.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Regardless what the license says, your employer might have a different opinion about including third-party sourcecode into the project.

Answer 2

The catch: you have to use it too reap the benefits of all the work.

But seriously reinventing boost is madness. Find what their (management) concerns are and work to break those issues down.

Or accept the pay, and keep your head down, Or start looking.

Madness all round.

Answer 3

Boost has one of the least restrictive licences I am aware of, so it is hard to see what any catch there could be.

Of course there is a catch to trying to re-create Boost: there are a lot of subtleties to the operation of the Boost libraries that will be very hard to re-create. Follow the Boost mailing list for a while to see the kind of depth of inspection and detail to which the libraries are subjected to on an ongoing basis.

Rather than just challenging the approach, start by asking why this approach is being proposed.

Answer 4

The version in the debian repositories isn't the newest and when downloading a new version of boost, you have to download almost 30MB and compile the libraries you want to use, which is extremely horrible, and you have to read some of the documentation twice before understanding it.
(Sorry, these are the only negative points I found.)

Answer 5

Nothing wrong with the boost licence, but the developer guidelines are a bit to relaxed - once a library is in the developer can change anything he wants - behavior and interface.

It happened to me with boost::exception (1.37 -> 1.38) where parts of the documented interface (functions and macros) just changed or simply dissapeared (without even a notice in the change log). Similar thing happened with boost::range behavior recently (dough the behavior was never precisely documented).

The official answer is that you should view each boost version as a different product. The problem with that is that the bug fixes will almost never end up in the previous versions if the library versions advanced.

The quality of any boost library depends on the quality and dedication of it's author! And sometimes there are no authors/maintainers anymore.

That being said, I still find some of the libraries genius and use then often.

Answer 6

Some parts of boost are very incestuous. To use a small boost library, often you end up (unknowingly) #including a huge amount of "junk". It is actually quite astonishing if you generate a dependency graph. Perhaps you don't need to support the dozen or so platforms that boost does, so a smaller amount of code would be easier to maintain.

Your employer or the environment your product must work in may be "security related". Certain national agencies that review your code may object to 3rd party code developed by unknown entities (even though the source code is clearly visible). Certain national agencies may not be comfortable with the coding standards used to develop boost. They may want you to take ownership of that boost code and bring it up to their (ancient and backward) coding standards. In that case it may be far less expensive to develop your own version of the boost code. Most likely your version will not have the usefuleness or scope of the boost code in this case, and may in fact take hours of painful debugging to make it correct, but it may be just fine for your application.

I'm not saying I agree with the above (because I don't), but that's the environment some of us find ourselves in. :(

Answer 7

Here are some possible issues:

• boost is a big dependency to have on your project. Maybe they're weary of adding such a dependency only for a few classes. You can get around this by using the bcp tool to extract only the parts of boost that you need.
• related to the former: once boost is in, it's possible that some programmers on the team will go wild with lambdas, mpl and such and increase the code size compile time. Good luck with those template metaprogramming error messages too!
• perhaps they're afraid of using an open source project without any support. BoostPro computing offers commercial boost support!
• watch out for Boost X projects that are not really part of boost. e.g: Boost Logging and projects that were only proposed for inclusion.
• perhaps they had trouble with compiling boost in the past (it used to be a bit difficult), but now you can download boost precompiled for some of the supported platforms from BoostPro.
• maybe they've heard bad rumors about boost's code bloat or hard to understand error messages.

That's about it... I'm afraid that you'll have to ask about these possible issues and be prepared with arguments. The request could be a silly mistake, but it could also make a lot of sense.

Answer 8

No matter how awesome and pure the code is, there might come a time when somebody with lots of lawyers will assert some kind of claim over it. Perhaps somebody worked on it while being under obligation to some BigCo, something like that. It's a legitimate business concern to be paranoid about such things, as unlikely as they may be.

Answer 9

Boost seems to increasy my compile time alot.

Answer 10

Boost is the primary source for C++'s standard library TRs so using it is a good advice. Rewriting Boost is nonsense. It's free and peer reviewed by many unbiased C++ experts and nothing can beat that. Ask your boss to really reconsider this or else you should consider quiting.