Review Wizard Status Report for September 2007

News

August 17, 2007 -- Time Series Accepted.
Announcement: http://lists.boost.org/boost-announce/2007/08/0142.php
July 24, 2007 -- Boost Version 1.34.1 Released.
This is a bug fix release addressing many problems with the 1.34.0 release. Announcement: http://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/query?status=closed&milestone=Boost+1.34.1

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 or library contributors. If you can serve as review manager for any of them, email Ron Garcia or John Phillips, "garcia at cs dot indiana dot edu" and "jphillip at capital dot edu" respectively.

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 before we do that, please email Ron or John.

If you're library author and plan on submitting a library for review in the next 3-6 months, send Ron or John a short description of your library and we'll add it to the Libraries Under Construction below. We know that there are many libraries that are near completion, but we have hard time keeping track all of them. Please keep us informed about your progress.

Review Queue

  • Exception
  • Finite State Machines
  • Floating Point Utilities
  • Switch
  • Property Map (fast-track)
  • Graph (fast-track)

Exception

Author:

Emil Dotchevski

Review Manager:

Need Volunteer

Download:

http://www.revergestudios.com/boost-exception/boost-exception.zip

Description:

The purpose of this library is to free designers of exception classes from having to consider what data needs to be stored in exception objects in order for the catch site to be able to make sense of what went wrong.

When the exception class is used, arbitrary values can be stored in any exception. This can be done directly in the throw-expression, or at a later time as the exception object propagates up the call stack. The ability to add data to any exception object after it has been thrown is important, because often some of the information needed to handle an exception is unavailable at the time of the throw.

Finite State Machines

Author:

Andrey Semashev

Review Manager:

Martin Vuille

Download:

Boost Sandbox Vault

Description:

The Boost.FSM library is an implementation of FSM (stands for Finite State Machine) programming concept. The main goals of the library are:

  • Simplicity. It should be very simple to create state machines using this library.
  • Performance. The state machine infrastructure should not be very time and memory-consuming in order to be applicable in more use cases.
  • Extensibility. A developer may want to add more states to an existing state machine. A developer should also be able to specify additional transitions and events for the machine with minimum modifications to the existing code.

Floating Point Utilities

Author:

Johan RĂ‚de

Review Manager:

Need Volunteer

Download:

Boost Sandbox Vault

Description:

The Floating Point Utilities library contains the following:

  • Floating point number classification functions: fpclassify, isfinite, isinf, isnan, isnormal (Follows TR1)
  • Sign bit functions: signbit, copysign, changesign (Follows TR1)
  • Facets that format and parse infinity and NaN according to the C99 standard. (These can be used for portable handling of infinity and NaN in text streams.)

Switch

Author:Steven Watanabe
Review Manager:Need Volunteer
Download:Boost Sandbox Vault
Description:The built in C/C++ switch statement is very efficient. Unfortunately, unlike a chained if/else construct there is no easy way to use it when the number of cases depends on a template parameter. The Switch library addresses this issue.

Property Map (fast-track)

Author:

Andrew Sutton

Review Manager:

Jeremy Siek

Download:

http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/graph-v2

Description:

A number of additions and modifications to the Property Map Library, including:

  • A constant-valued property map, useful for naturally unweighted graphs.
  • A noop-writing property map, useful when you have to provide an argument, but just don't care about the output.
  • See ChangeLog for details.

Graph (fast-track)

Author:

Andrew Sutton

Review Manager:

Jeremy Siek

Download:

http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/graph-v2

Description:

A number of additions and modifications to the Graph Library, including:

  • Two new graph classes (undirected and directed) which are intended to make the library more approachable for new developers
  • A suite of graph measures including degree and closeness centrality, mean geodesic distance, eccentricity, and clustering coefficients.
  • An algorithm for visiting all cycles in a directed graph (Tiernan's from 1970ish). It works for undirected graphs too, but reports cycles twice (one for each direction).
  • An algorithm for visiting all the cliques a graph (Bron&Kerbosch). Works for both directed and undirected.
  • Derived graph measures radius and diameter (from eccentricity) and girth and circumference (from Tiernan), and clique number (from Bron&Kerbosch).
  • An exterior_property class that helps hides some of the weirdness with exterior properties.
  • runtime and compile-time tests for the new algorithms.
  • a substantial amount of documentation
  • Graph cores, implemented by David Gleich (@Stanford University)
  • Deterministic graph generators - capable of creating or inducing specific types of graphs over a vertex set (e.g., star graph, wheel graph, prism graph, etc). There are several other specific types that could be added to this, but I haven't had the time just yet.

Libraries under development

Dataflow

Author:Stjepan Rajko
Description:The Dataflow library provides generic support for data producers, consumers, and connections between the two. It also provides layers for several specific dataflow mechanisms, namely Boost.Signals, VTK data/display pipelines, and plain pointers. The Dataflow library came out of the Signal Network GSoC project, mentored by Doug Gregor.
Status:I am polishing the Dataflow library for submission, and am expecting to add it to the review queue in the next couple of months. I am currently ironing out some faults in the design of the library, filling in missing features, and testing it on / adapting it to different dataflow mechanisms (currently VTK and soon Boost.Iostreams). As soon as I'm pretty sure that things are going the right way, I'll submit this to the review queue while I do the finishing touches.

Constrained Value

Author:

Robert Kawulak

Download:

http://rk.go.pl/f/constrained_value.zip

http://rk.go.pl/r/constrained_value (Documentation)

Description:

The Constrained Value library contains class templates useful for creating constrained objects. The simplest example of a constrained object is hour. The only valid values for an hour within a day are integers from the range [0, 23]. With this library, you can create a variable which behaves exactly like int, but does not allow for assignment of values which do not belong to the allowed range. The library doesn't focus only on constrained objects that hold a value belonging to a specified range (i.e., bounded objects). Virtually any constraint can be imposed using appropriate predicate. You can specify what happens in case of assignment of an invalid value, e.g. an exception may be thrown or the value may be adjusted to meet the constraint criterions.

Status:

I'm planning to finish it in 1-2 months.

Please let us know of any libraries you are currently developing that you intend to submit for review.