I’ve recently been looking at the Boost Graph Library (BGL), by reading through the excellent BGL book and playing with the BGL examples, which are mostly from the book.  Although it  was written 15 years ago, in 2001, it doesn’t feel dated because it uses techniques being actively discussed now for C++17 or later. And there’s a clear lineage from then to now.

For instance, I’ve been watching the charming Programming Conversations videos by Alexander Stepanov, who brought generic programming to C++ by designing the STL. At some early point in the videos, he mentioned the idea of concepts, which he expected to be in C++17, and showed how he mimicked the simpler concepts syntax (without the checking) with some #defines. Unfortunately, that proposal, by Andrew Sutton, has recently been rejected for C++17, though it seems likely to succeed after C++17. Andrew Sutton demonstrates the proposed syntax wonderfully in this C++Now 2015 Keynote video. He has implemented C++ concepts in gcc 6, and I’ve played with it very superficially for libsigc++.

I’ve written and maintained lots of C++ template code and I’ve never liked how each template makes only implicit requirements of its types. I would feel more comfortable if I could express those requirements in a concept and have the compiler tell me if my template’s types don’t “model” the concept. Eventually compiler errors will then mention problems at that higher level instead of spewing details about exactly how compilation failed. And eventually, C++ might allow checking of semantics as well as just syntax. I can even imagine tools that would analyze template code and suggest that it should require certain concepts for its types, a little like how the latest compilers can suggest that I use the override keyword on virtual method overloads. This means more checking at compile time, and that makes me happy. However, I understand why it would need multiple compilers to implement it before it would be accepted into C++17.

Anyway, I started reading that BGL book and immediately noticed the foreword by the same Alexandar Stepanov, which mentions generic programming ideas such as concepts. The BGL uses concepts, though with minimal checking, and the book uses these to show the structure of the API. Furthermore, as I tried to get some simple changes into the BGL, I noticed that the same Andrew Sutton had been a maintainer of the BGL.

I began playing with the BGL by converting its example code to modern C++, replacing as many of those verbose traits typedefs and awkward tie() calls, with the auto keyword and range-based for loops. The result looks far clearer to me, letting us see how the API could be improved further. For instance, the BGL’s use of generic free-standing functions can seem a little unconstrained to people used to knowing exactly what method they can call on what object, particularly as the BGL puts everything in the boost namespace instead of boost::graph). But Bjarne Stroustrup’s Unified Call proposal (apparently rejected for C++17 too) would improve that. For instance, num_vertices(graph), could be written as graph.num_vertices() and Concepts would let the compiler know if that should be allowed.

So, though the BGL source code seems to have had very little attention over the last 15 years, and now looks almost abandoned, it’s clearly been an inspiration for the most current trends in C++, such as Concepts and Unified Calling. All the work on C++11 and C++14 has drained the swamp so much that these old ideas are now more obviously necessary.