[Monotone-devel] Re: ding dong, boost::filesystem is dead

[Anthony Williams]

Eric Niebler <address@hidden> writes:

>>> If you're not going to be removing regex all together, and you're not going 
>>> to
>>> write your own regex engine, so monotone will still depend on an external
>>> library (e.g. pcre), why try and remove the dependency on the boost regex
>>> library?
>> boost::regex in particular has the additional problem of depending on
>> libicu (if built that way) whether or not the Unicode interfaces are
>> used.  (We don't.)  Libicu is huge, and has a bug that (on at least
>> Linux and Solaris) renders ineffective all our efforts to keep thread
>> overhead out of the C++ runtime.
>> It is also, itself, five times larger than libpcre.
>
>
> A few observations. You don't need to build boost.regex separately, or
> any boost library for that matter. You could simply add its sources to
> your own project and compile it in. You certainly don't need to compile
> boost.regex with ICU support if you don't want it. True, when you
> compile boost.regex separately into a shared lib, it can be large, but
> if you statically link it, the linker can throw out the parts that are
> not used. And if you "compile it in" like I suggest above, you only get
> the parts you actually use. Finally, as of v1.34, Boost has a
> header-only regex library called Xpressive, which is another option for you.

Just to add:

John Maddock, the author of boost.regex has offered to refactor boost.regex to
be header-only if this is the only showstopper for monotone.

Anthony
-- 
Anthony Williams
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