version and debug statements

[Walter Bright]

Sean Kelly wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> <flame on>
>> C++ was supposed to reduce the use of the preprocessor. Boost is 
>> peer-reviewed and written by the best and the brightest C++ 
>> developers. So why does even the simplest Boost code *heavily* rely on 
>> complex, obtuse, layer after layer of preprocessor macros?
>> <flame off>
> 
> It's interesting to see how Boost components have evolved over time. For 
> example, the implementation of shared_ptr used to be extremely 
> straightforward--it comprised maybe 100 lines of code with nary a macro 
> to be seen.  Now it's spread across multiple files, contains dense and 
> complicated code, and has more features than I care to list.  In some 
> respects this reminds me of what I call the "Microsoft Word" syndrome. 
> That being that everyone wants a very small subset of features in a 
> product, but all of those people want *different* features.

Frankly, I find boost to be unusable. If you're lucky, it works right 
out of the box. The slightest thing going wrong, however, and you're 
faced with an incomprehensible error message, #include's spread over 
several directories, the layers of macros, layers of templates, and no 
clue as to what is relevant and what is puffery.

> Another factor may be that while it's quite difficult to write an easily 
> usable library, it's far more difficult to do so using simple, 
> straightforward code or to maintain this simplicity across maintenance 
> cycles.  shared_ptr started out clean and compact, but it certainly 
> didn't stay that way.  Perhaps there's simply more pressure to get 
> improvements done than to do so in a clearly readable manner, or perhaps 
> it's an issue of too many fingers spoiling the soup?  I suppose it also 
> doesn't help that the best and brightest may occasionally lack 
> perspective on what's understandable to the average person, or perhaps 
> there's simply no perceived need for users to be able to make sense of 
> the code.

True genius is being able to find the underlying simplicity of 
something. Anyone can make something complicated. It takes a genius to 
make something so simple that everyone else says "of course, why didn't 
I think of that myself?" An airplane, for example, is a simple and 
obvious device. But it took a (pair) of geniuses to figure that out.