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Re: Safe Integer Types (P0228R0)

From: Federico Kircheis <federico.kircheis_at_[hidden]>
Date: Sat, 3 Aug 2019 06:48:56 +0200
On 02.08.19 20:11, David Svoboda via Std-Discussion wrote:
> Hello, I am curious as to the status of the document P0228R0 in C++?
> http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2016/p0228r0.pdf
> It was written in Feb 2016, but I can't seem to access any WG21 meeting
> minutes newer than that.
>
> More to the point, I am wondering if there are any proposals for safe
> integer operations, and if so, what is their status? Did they get
> adopted into a TS? They didn't seem to make it into C++17 or 20.
>

I've chatted with Robert Ramey a couple of years ago about it, this is
what he wrote me (in case he is not in the mailing list):


----
I made a presentation to the SG-6 committee via skype in February 2016. 
The response was not negative, but not enthusiastic either.  I concluded 
that getting something like safe numerics into the standard would be a 
lot of work, require attendance at many meetings, be extremely tedious 
and take several years.  I've also concluded that for very complex 
libraries such as this one, the standards track doesn't work well. I 
concluded that it wasn't worth it.  When I was recently contacted by the 
committee about the proposal we discussed the above and they decided to 
put the proposal on "hold" which was fine by me.
I redirected my efforts to getting safe numerics accepted as a boost 
library.  It got 5 reviews - all positive - and so was accepted - 
subject to a long list of conditions.  This list was basically what was 
needed to "finish" the library: fix bugs, refine concepts, add more 
tests, etc. etc.  I've been working on this since the review - it's a 
lot of work.  I thought the library was in very good shape. The review 
made it clear that I was wrong about this.  On the good side, the 
changes are working out well and I'm optimistic that the library will be 
of high quality when merged into boost.  I'm hoping this will occur 
before CPPCon in september.
Then the real work begins.  Most programmers do not believe that 
erroneous arithmetic results are a serious problem and that addressing 
them is not worth the hit on performance.  I'm convinced otherwise of 
course so I will have to spend time evangelizing the usage of the safe 
numerics library.
----
So, unless something has changed (discussion was in 2017) there is no 
further work, and that's why you could only find the minutes from Feb 2016.
Federico

Received on 2019-08-02 23:50:58