Re: [Adobe-source-devel] What is the status of ASL?

[Sean P. <sea...@ma...>]

On Oct 27, 2009, at 5:05 AM, est wrote:

> Hi All!
>
> I've been using ASL for my projects for the last year
> and I'm very happy with it. The libraries are very useful
> and also a great source of inspiration for my own coding.

Glad to hear it! I'd like to hear from others on this list - are you  
using ASL? For what?

>
> I'd like to know what is the status of ASL. The last
> release was some months ago and there is little traffic
> in the mailing lists.

The Adobe Software Technology Lab has been disbanded. Foster is still  
at Adobe, working on Ps. Alex and Paul are also still at Adobe but had  
little direct involvement in ASL (but you might be interested in their  
book, Elements of Programming). Mat left some time ago but still pops  
in to the conversation on occasion. I'm now at Google working on  
ChromeOS.

The Google style guide (adhered to by most of Google) has made it a  
bit difficult for me to spend too much time on ASL.

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.xml

Some of the more challenging parts are - limited use of Boost, no  
exception handling, and discouraged copy and assignment. Right now I  
feel like I'm coding with one hand behind my back (I'm also doing a  
lot more on linux these days and bad ergonomic habits for hitting  
command key only with my left thumb have translated to hitting the  
control key with my left thumb and has sparked a carpal tunnel flare  
that makes it painful to type. I'm trying hard now to break 25 years  
of bad habits!)

That said - I have been doing a little work on ASL. If you look in my  
sandbox I just submitted the start of some work for an ABI safe  
function<> and there is some work to clean up some stuff in functional  
as well. I'm also still talking with Jaakko Jarvi about continuing our  
collaboration on property models - there are a number of features in  
for the property model library (Adam) that I think we could get in  
(distribution in relate clauses and even better dependency tracking).

Google lets me pick a project to spend 20% of my time on and whatever  
I choose will likely be ASL related in some form (there are several  
ideas I'm kicking around here, the problem isn't finding an idea it is  
choosing from the many options). I also haven't given up on working  
ASL into my 80% job yet.

> In addition, the library doesn't build
> in linux, gcc 4.3.2 with some trivial changes in closed_map_hash
> and any_regular.

Please contribute! ASL was the most active as a community when Foster  
was able to spend time, umm, fostering the community relationships.  
Community building isn't my suit though I'm looking for ways to re- 
spark interest (like attempting to keep a blog going again). Another  
way to spark ASL development may be to part it out into Boost - I've  
always been supportive of such work it just was never important to the  
STLab charter.

Other suggestions?

> Thank you!

Thank you for your support. The importance of ASL are the ideas behind  
it, without a community those ideas will die and I believe the work is  
too important to let that happen.


>
> Est.
>
>
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