Stacktrace library starts review today 14th Dec

The formal review of the Stacktrace library by Antony Polukhin starts 

today 14th Dec and will conclude before Christmas. I appreciate we 
are likely a bit tired out from the many library reviews recently and 
of course it's Christmas, but given the lack of a portable way to 
work with stack backtraces, which you inevitably need to do 
eventually in any non-toy production application, Stacktrace needs 
your review!

Stacktrace is an optionally header-only library providing four 
implementation backends, libunwind (POSIX only), windbg (Windows 
only), backtrace (from the C library on most POSIX implementations) 
and a null backend. At its very simplest it lets you capture the 
stack backtrace for the calling thread and to print it to a 
std::ostream& of your choice. The basic_stacktrace<> class quacks 
like a STL container of frame object instances. The rest of the API 
pretty much follows STL design principles for the most part. Use is 
therefore unsurprising.

You can find the documentation at 
http://apolukhin.github.io/stacktrace/index.html and the github repo 
at https://github.com/apolukhin/stacktrace.

Review guidelines
=================

Reviews should be submitted to the developer list 
([email protected]), preferably with '[stacktrace]' in the 
subject. Or if you don't wish to for some reason or are not 
subscribed to the developer list you can send them privately to me at 
's_sourceforge at nedprod dot com'. If so, please let me know whether 
or not you'd like your review to be forwarded to the list.  

For your review you may wish to consider the following questions:

      - What is your evaluation of the design?

      - What is your evaluation of the implementation? Most of my 
personal concerns with this library are with the implementation and I 
would hugely appreciate feedback from others with substantial 
experience of using stacktracing "in anger" in non-trivial use case 
scenarios.

      - What is your evaluation of the documentation?
      - What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the
        library?
      - Did you try to use the library?  With what compiler?  Did you
        have any problems?
      - How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A
        quick reading? In-depth study?
      - Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain?

And finally, every review should attempt to answer this question:

      - Do you think the library should be accepted as a Boost 
library?

Be sure to say this explicitly so that your other comments don't 
obscure your overall opinion.  

Even if you do not wish to give a full review any technical comment 
regarding the library is welcome as part of the review period and 
will help me as the review manager decide whether the library should 
be accepted as a Boost library. Any questions about the use of the 
library are also welcome.  

Finally, thanks to Edward whose announcement of the Synapse library 
review I borrowed heavily from as I thought it very well structured. 
Hopefully the above is just as clear.

Niall

-- 
ned Productions Limited Consulting
http://www.nedproductions.biz/ 
http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/