Compare boost::hana to D

[Ali Çehreli via Digitalmars-d]

On 04/20/2017 02:06 AM, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
 > On Wednesday, 19 April 2017 at 08:19:52 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
 >> I'm brushing up on my C++ to prepare for my C++Now 2017
 >> presentation[1]. boost::hana is an impressive library that overlaps
 >> with many D features:
 >>
 >>   http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_64_0_b2/libs/hana/doc/html/index.html
 >>
 >> Have you used boost::hana? What are your thoughts on it?
 >
 > I've looked at it and concluded that it didn't really offer anything
 > substantial for me over what I can do with C++17 and my own minor
 > extensions to the C++ standard lib.
 >
 > But I'm not really keen on pulling in boost  in general as the best
 > parts of it ends up in the C++ standard anyway when it is mature...

To their credit, according to their documentation, boost::hana is a 
header-only library.

 > What specifically are you finding in boost::hana that justifies adding
 > it as a dependency?

My motivation is learning enough about modern C++ to not make a fool of 
myself in front of an expert C++ crowd. :) If I hadn't known about 
boost::hana, I could have easily stressed D's compile-time features as 
if C++ did not have them. Now I see that although 
as-always-less-readable, C++ has lots of compile-time features through 
boost::hana. For example, boost::hana has the equivalent of AliasSeq, 
and it's not too inconvenient.

Ali