Bulldozer00's Blog

To support my yearning for learning, I continuously scan and probe all kinds of forums, books, articles, and blogs for deeper insights into, and mastery of, the C++ programming language. In all my external travels, I’ve never come across anyone in the C++ community that has ever trashed the boost libraries. Au contraire, every single reference that I’ve ever seen has praised boost as a world class open source organization that produces world class, highly efficient code for reuse. Here’s just one example of praise from Scott Meyers‘ classic “Effective C++: 55 Specific Ways To Improve Your Programs And Designs“:

Notice that in the first paragraph, I wrote the word external in bold. Internal, which means “at work” where politics is always involved, is another story. Sooooo, let me tell you one.

Years ago, a smart, highly productive, and dedicated developer who I respect started building a distributed “framework” on top of the ACE library set (not as a formal project – on his own time). There’s no doubt that ACE is a very powerful, robust, and battle-tested platform. However, because it was designed back in the days when C++ compiler technology was immature, I think its API is, let’s say “frumpy“, unconventional, and (dare I say) “obsolete” compared to the more modern Boost APIs. Boost-based code looks like natural C++, whereas ACE-based code looks like a macro derived dialect. In the functional areas where ACE and Boost overlap (which IMHO is large), I think that Boost is head over heels easier to learn and use. But that’s just me, and if you’re a long-time ACE advocate you might be mad at me now because you’re blinded by your bias – just like I am blinded by mine.

Fast forward to the present moment after other groups in the company (essentially, having no choice) have built their one-off applications on top of the homegrown, ACE-based, framework. Of course, you know through experience that “homegrown” means:

• the framework API is poorly documented,
• the build process is poorly documented,
• forks have been spawned because of the lack of a formally funded maintenance team and change process,
• the boundary between user and library code is jagged/blurry,
• example code tutorials are non-existent.
• it is most likely to cost less to build your own, lighter weight framework from scratch than to scale the learning curve by studying tens of 1,000s of lines of framework code to separate the API from the implementation and figure out how to use the dang thing.

Despite the time-proven assertions above, the framework author and a couple of “other” promoters who’ve never even tried to extract/build the framework, let alone learn the basics of the “jagged” API and write a simple sample distributed app on top of it, have naturally auto-assumed that reusing the framework in all new projects will save the company time and money.

Along comes a new project in which the evil Bulldozer00 (BD00) is a team member. Being suspicious of the internal marketing hype, and in response to the “indirect pressure and unspoken coercion” to architect, design, and build on top of the one and only homegrown framework, BD00 investigates the “product“. After spending the better part of a week browsing the code base and frustratingly trying to build the framework so that he could write a little distributed test app, BD00 gives up and concludes that the bulleted list definition above has withstood the test of time….. yet again.

When other members of BD00’s team, including one member who directly used the ACE-based framework on a previous project, investigate the qualities of the framework, they come to the same conclusion: thank you, but for our project, we’ll roll our own lighter weight, more targeted, and more “modern” framework on top of Boost. But of course, BD00 is the only politically incorrect and blatantly over-the-top rejector of the intended one-size-fits-all framework. In predictable cause-effect fashion, the homegrown framework advocates dig their heels in against BD00’s technical criticisms and step up their “cost and time savings” rhetoric – including a diss against Boost in their internal marketing materials. Hmmm.

Since application infrastructure is not a company core competence and certainly not a revenue generator, BD00 “cleverly” suggests releasing the framework into the open source community to test its viability and ability to attract an external following. The suggestion falls on deaf ears – of course. Even though BD00 (who’s deliberately evil foot-in-mouth approach to conflict-handling almost always triggers the classic auto-reject response in others) made the helpful(?) suggestion, the odds are that it would be ignored regardless of who had made it. Based on your personal experience, do you agree?

Note 1: If interested, check out this ACE vs Boost vs Poco libraries discussion on StackOverflow.com.

Note2: There’s a whole ‘nother sensitive socio-technical dimension to this story that may trigger yet another blog post in the future. If you’ve followed this blog, I’ve hinted about this bone of contention in several past posts. The diagram below gives a further hint as to its nature.