[LLVMdev] Boost Support

[Chris Lattner]

On Wed, 4 Jul 2007, David A. Greene wrote:
> I've been doing some experiments with the Boost Graph Library (BGL) and 
> interfacing to llvm's GraphWriter system.  I'm using GBL for some custom 
> work and needed a way to hook BGL's write_graphviz into GraphWriter to 
> use the existing display infrastructure.

ok

> To do this I added a HAVE_BOOST configure item and #ifdef'd the Boost
> support code in GraphWriter.
>
> Is this useful to anyone else?  Is it something desireable to contribute back?

I'd prefer not to do this.  Boost contains a lot of powerful stuff, but 
its power comes at a significant compile-time cost.  Further, LLVM used to 
use boost for various small things, and it was always a problem keeping in 
sync with various versions of boost.

In order to pull in boost, it would have to give us *significant* new 
functionality that we can't reasonably implement another way.

> This also opens a larger question about whether making use of Boost components
> is a reasonable thing to do.  We already have some Boost type traits in the
> llvm tree.  Why not just use the real thing (or use tr1 type traits)?

Portability, dependency on another third-party library, compile-time, 
bulk, etc.

> A smaller step would be to accept tr1 things.

Unfortunately, tr1 isn't widely available yet.  Relying on it would make 
LLVM less portable, no?

-Chris

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