Boost C++ Libraries

...one of the most highly regarded and expertly designed C++ library projects in the world. — Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu, C++ Coding Standards

Boost.Flyweight Future work

Tests

Index

Release notes

New functionalities can be included into future releases of Boost.Flyweight to meet the demands of users and to leverage upcoming C++ features and new Boost libraries. The following is a list of candidate additions.

Introspection API
Read/write locking policy
Integration with new Boost libraries

Introspection API

Currently there is no way to access the internal components of a flyweight instantiation (factory, holder, etc.) or even to know the types of these components. With such an API it would be possible to instrument and monitor the usage of Boost.Flyweight like in the following example:

typedef flyweight<std::string> fw_type;
...
std::cout<<"factory used:  "<<typeid(fw_type::factory_type).name()<<std::endl;
std::cout<<"values stored: "<<fw_type::factory().size()<<std::endl;

Read/write locking policy

The nature of the flyweight pattern implies that most accesses to the internal flyweight factory do not cause new insertions and can thus be considered read-only. This hints at the convenience of using a locking policy based on read/write locks such as those provided by Boost.Thread. Implementing a locking policy will also require extending the Factory concept to allow for pure lookup operations. Tim Blechmann has provided a preliminary implementation of this idea. Before committing to this library extension it is necessary to do a profiling study to determine whether read/write locking actually improves performance.

Integration with new Boost libraries

Recently accepted Boost libraries like Boost.Functional/Forward and Boost.Functional/Factory might be used in the future to replace some internal machinery of Boost.Flyweight.