Comparing the C++ Standard and Boost 333
Nerval's Lobster writes "The one and only Jeff Cogswell is back with an article exploring an issue important to anyone who works with C++. It's been two years since the ISO C++ committee approved the final draft of the newest C++ standard; now that time has passed, he writes, 'we can go back and look at some issues that have affected the language (indeed, ever since the first international standard in 1998) and compare its final result and product to a popular C++ library called Boost.' A lot of development groups have adopted the use of Boost, and still others are considering whether to embrace it: that makes a discussion (and comparison) of its features worthwhile. 'The Standards Committee took some eight years to fight over what should be in the standard, and the compiler vendors had to wait for all that to get ironed out before they could publish an implementation of the Standard Library,' he writes. 'But meanwhile the actual C++ community was moving forward on its own, building better things such as Boost.'"
need more meat in that article (Score:5, Informative)
instead of verbose vagueness need to have lists of comparisons between standard libraries and boost. is this author practicing to be paid by the word?
Slam me all you like (Score:2, Informative)
But the day I walked away from C++, Boost and MFC (mutha fucking classes) and joined a C# .Net shop was the happiest day of my life. Slam it all you like, but for UI development, Boost and MFC /Win32 is the worst platform to develop on unless you are a clueless sadomasochist that enjoys pain and suffering.
Re:Academic (Score:5, Informative)
For example, try to create a random number from 0 to 1.
This is almost always an error. Your poor use of terminology on this matter tells me that you've probably implemented the error.
It is nearly always the case that when you think that you need a value in the range [0.0 to 1.0], that what you more precisely need is a value in the range [0.0 to ((double) RAND_MAX / (RAND_MAX + 1))]. Otherwise any sort of binning done with this value (such as selecting a random element from an array) will have non-uniform distribution.
You will thank me some day.