Coding standards

[eburkitt]

What is the position of the project leads regarding introduction of 3rd-party dependencies to the v3 code base? I'm thinking specifically of the Boost libraries at the moment, but it would be good to have some guidelines as to what's acceptable generally.

-evan

[kimmov]

I think the "policy" is to get things done efficiently. If some external library helps, we should consider it. Of course we must consider compiling, installation etc also. Or if the library is cross-platform and so on. External libraries always cause some trouble (for somebody) and we must consider the advantages and disadvantages case by case.

As for Boost, I think it is welcome, especially if we can limit to header-only libraries. But I'd prefer using STL and Qt where possible.

[eburkitt]

That's certainly reasonable. The question originally came from my desire to have access to the Boost Smart Ptr library, but I later noticed that Qt has at least one smart pointer itself. I've not worked with Qt before, so I will definitely be spending some time with its documentation to get a sense of what's available.

If I need capability beyond what the standard library and Qt can provide, choosing a library with: an OSS-compatible license, cross-platform availability and a header-only (or at least statically linkable) implementation, in roughly that order of importance, should keep me from doing too much damage.

-evan