Re: Re: [boost] Re: Next revision of boost::thread

[Beman Dawes]

At 11:44 AM 1/9/2003, William E. Kempf wrote:

>As for conditional compilation... the Boost.Filesystem stuff has no
>need for this, while Boost.Threads has a very definate need.

The reason that Boost.Filesystem doesn't have conditional compilation is that a design decision was made to limit the library to features which could be implemented in both POSIX and Windows.

Otherwise it would have been shot full of optional/conditional features.

I'm not saying Boost.Threads should take exactly the same approach, but I'd rather not see a lot of optional/conditional features to support operating systems other than those two O/S families.

What I found doing research for the Filesystem library was that most of the remaining legacy systems have been retrofitted to support POSIX, while new O/S designs tend to support POSIX right from the start.

What is left are features that are so system specific that those wishing to take advantage of the features should just use the operating system's native API. The programs aren't going to be portable in any case, so why provide an illusion of portability where there is none?

--Beman


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