Google Summer of Code 2009

Boost.Serialization

Here are a few small projects which would be really helpful.

Performance Testing and Profiling

I've managed to setup performance profiling using the following:

• current (as I write this) Boost.Build tools.
• the gcc compiler.
• and a shell script - profile.sh
• library_status program from the tools/regression/src directory

Invoking profile script produces a table which shows the results of each test and links to the actual profile.

The first thing I did was include some of the serialization library tests. It became immediately apparent that these tests were totally unsuitable for performance testing and that new tests needed to be written for this purpose. These tests would highlight the location of any performance bottlenecks in the serialization library. Whenever I've subjected my code in the past to this type of analysis, I've always been suprised to find bottlenecks in totally unanticipated places and fixing those has always lead to large improvements in performance. I expect that this project would have a huge impact on the utility of the serialization library.

Back Versioning

It has been suggested that a useful feature of the library would be the ability to create "older versions" of archives. Currently, the library permits one make programs that are guarenteed the ability to load archives with classes of a previous version. But there is not way to save classes in accordance with a previous version. At first I dismissed this a a huge project with small demand. A cursory examination of the code revealed that this would not be very difficult. It would require some small changes in code and some additional tests. Also it would require special treatment in the documentation - perhaps a case study.

Environments without RTTI

I note that some have commented that this library requires RTTI. This is not strictly true. The examples and almost all the tests presume the existence of RTTI. But it should be possible to use the library without it. The example used for testing is an extended_typeinfo implemenation which presumes that all classes names have been exported. So, to make this library compatible for platforms without RTTI, a set of tests, examples and new manual section would have to be created

Portable Archives (straszheim)

A method for testing portability was suggested (save and load to a portable binary archive, and verify that the checksum of the binary archive matches some checksum. This would involve development of the archive and tests.

Maximum version check (straszheim)

See ​https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/2830

Export name aliasing (straszheim)

If you change the name under which a class is BOOST_CLASS_EXPORT'ed you break backwards compatibility... you can't read older archives. In addition there is no way to have more than one class exported under the same name.

Boost.Python

• Python 3.0 support
• Ability to extend the fundamental PyTypeObject used by boost.python
• Thread safety
• PyFinalize support
• Easier methods to write to_python/from_python converters

Boost.Proto

support for two-level (van Wijngaarden) grammars (niebler)

Proto is essentially a compiler construction toolkit for DSELs. It allows you to define the grammar for the DSEL, but currently has no native support for DSEL type systems. Support for two-level grammars would fill that hole.

The job would need a student who has experience with type theory and a solid grasp of C++ template metaprogramming. The can read more about the problem in this thread:

​http://groups.google.com/group/boost-list/browse_frm/thread/df6ecfb0089b28fd