Overview I’ve been very busy these last two months getting Boost.JSON ready for release, hence the combined blog post. Now that things are winding down, I hopefully can get back the normal blog release schedule. Boost.JSON Aside from a couple of personal projects, the vast majority of my time was spent getting Boost.JSON set for release. Breaking it down, this consisted of three main tasks: a tag_invoke based value conversion interface, parser optimizations, and support for extended JSON syntax. Value Conversion Our previous interface that allowed users to specify their own conversions to and from value proved unsatisfactory, as it required too much boiler-plate when specifying conversions to and from non-class types (e.g. enumeration types). To remedy this, I was tasked with implementing an ADL solution based on tag_invoke which greatly reduces the amount of boiler-plate and provides a single, straightforward way to implement a custom conversion. For example, consider the following class type: struct customer { std::string name; std::size_t balance; }; To convert an object of type customer to value, all you need is to write an overload of tag_invoke. This can be implemented as an inline friend function within the class definition (thus making it visible to ADL...

Boost 1.74 - Interesting Developments in Asio We’re currently beta-testing Boost 1.74, the lead-up to which has seen a flurry of activity in Asio, which has impacted Beast. Recent versions of Asio have moved away from the idea of sequencing completion handlers directly on an io_context (which used to be called an io_service) towards the execution of completion handlers by an Executor. The basic idea being that the executor is a lightweight handle to some execution context, which did what the io_context always used to do - schedule the execution of completion handlers. The changes to Asio have been tracking The Networking TS which describes a concept of Executor relevant to asynchronous IO. The Unified Executors proposal unifies the concepts of io execution and the general concept of “a place to execute work” - a somewhat more generic idea than merely an IO loop or thread pool. Work has been ongoing by the members of WG21 to produce an execution model that serves all parties’ needs. Courtesy of an incredible effort by Chris Kohlhoff, Latest Asio and Boost.Asio 1.74 has been updated to accommodate both models of executors, with the Unified Executors model being the default. It’s important to note...

Overview Greetings, and welcome to my first blog post at The C++ Alliance. I’ve recently begun working on an interesting project for the Alliance which might also have more widespread applicability. The same requirement could possibly apply to your organization as well. Consider an open-source project that has multiple contributors who are submitting changes via pull-requests in Github. You’d like to have assurances that a pull-request passes all tests before being merged. That is done with continuous integration solutions such as Travis or Circle-CI, which are quite popular and well-known. Similarly, if the submission is documentation, you would like to be able to view the formatted output in it’s final published format so you can review the layout, the colors, and so on. What would be the best way to build and publish documentation from pull requests? Perhaps the first thought would be to include the functionality in Travis or Circle-CI. And that is certainly possible. However, in some cases there may be sensitive passwords, ssh keys, or other tokens in the configuration. Is it safe to allow random pull requests, from conceivably anyone on the whole internet, to trigger a Circle-CI build that contains authentication information? Let’s explore that...

Overview Boost 1.73.0 has been released! Save for some minor documentation issues, Boost.StaticString enjoyed a bug-free release, so most of this month was spent working on Boost.JSON getting it ready for review. Unfortunately, I could not spend too much time working due to school and final exams, but now that those have passed I’ll be able to put in significantly more time working on projects such as Boost.JSON. Boost.JSON A good portion of my work on Boost.JSON was spent updating the documentation to reflect the replacement of the storage allocator model with boost::container::pmr::memory_resource (or std::pmr::memory_resource in standalone). The old model wasn’t necessarily bad, but using memory_resource permits the use of existing allocators found in Boost.Container/the standard library, eliminating the need for writing proprietary allocators that only work with Boost.JSON. Even though storage will be going away, storage_ptr will remain to support shared ownership of a memory_resource – something that polymorphic_allocator lacks. As with polymorphic_allocator, storage_ptr will still support non-owning reference semantics in contexts where the lifetime of a memory_resource is bound to a scope, giving users more flexibility. I also worked on monotonic_resource, the memory_resource counterpart to pool. This allocator has one goal: to be fast. I ended up adding...

Boost 1.73 Released and other Matters The 1.73.0 release of Boost took up more attention than I had anticipated, but in the end all seemed to go well. Since then I’ve been working through the issues list on GitHub and am now starting to make some headway. I cam across a few other interesting (to me) topics this month. (Possibly) Interesting Asio Things Last month I asked the question, “Is it possible to write an asynchronous composed operation entirely as a lambda?”. This month I went a little further with two items that interested me. The first is whether asio’s async_compose can be adapted so that we can implement a complex composed operation involving more than one IO object easily using the asio faux coroutine mechanism. The second was whether is was possible to easily implement an async future in Asio. Async Asio Future Here is my motivating use case: auto p = async::promise<std::string>(); auto f = p.get_future(); // long-running process starts which will yield a string start_something(std::move(p)); // wait on the future f.async_wait([](some_result_type x) { // use the x }); // or auto str = co_await f.async_wait(net::use_awaitable); // or shorthand auto str = co_await f(); The salient points here...

Boost 1.73 New Library StaticString: A dynamically resizable string of characters with compile-time fixed capacity and contiguous embedded storage, from Krystian Stasiowski and Vinnie Falco. Boost Release Notes

The Rundown Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, my classes have been moved online. It’s certainly an interesting way to teach, but admittedly I can’t say it’s enjoyable or effective. However, it has given me a lot of time to work on various projects, which is a reasonable trade-off (at least in my opinion). I got quite a bit done this month due to the substantial increase in leisure time, and was able to work on several projects that previously didn’t fit into my schedule. Boost.StaticString I spent the first few days of March putting the finishing touches on Boost.StaticString in preparation for the release of Boost 1.73.0, mostly consisting of housekeeping tasks, but also some bug fixes for certain compiler configurations. In particular, a problem arose with GCC 5 regarding its constexpr support, two of which impede using basic_static_string during constant evaluation: throw expressions, and non-static member functions whose return type is the class they are a member of. With respect to the former, consider the following: constexpr int throw_not_evaluated(bool flag) { if (flag) throw 1; return 0; } constexpr int const_eval = throw_not_evaluated(false); View this on Godbolt It is helpful to first establish what the standard has to say...

Coding in the time of a Pandemic It has been an interesting month, there having been the minor distraction of a lockdown of our little country. The borders with Spain and France were closed about three weeks ago and all residents have been asked to stay at home other than to buy groceries or walk their dogs. Fortunately I have dogs so I at least have a legitimate reason to see the sun. One of the advantages of living in a tiny country is that the government has been able to secure the supply of 150,000 COVID-19 testing kits, which represents two tests per resident. They are also working on supplying every resident with masks for use when shopping. I am hoping to report in my next blog that we are allowed outside subject to a negative test and the wearing of a mask and gloves. Fortunately, until today, our internet has been uninterrupted. Communication with my friends and colleagues at the C++ Alliance and the wider developer community has continued. Boost Release The Boost 1.73 release is imminent. Thus much of my focus in the latter half of the month has been on addressing any remaining issues in Beast...

Introduction I’m a first-year university student at the University of Connecticut pursuing a degree in Computer Science. I joined The C++ Alliance near the end of January as a part-time Staff Engineer at the recommendation of Vinnie, who has been mentoring me for the past several months. I’ve been programming in C++ for around 2 years now, with an interest in library development and standardization. My original reasoning for choosing C++ over other languages was a little misguided, being that it was generally regarded as a difficult language, and I liked the challenge. Prior to this, I had dabbled in the language a little bit, but I really didn’t get into it until I discovered the existence of the standard. A language with explicitly defined semantics, all specified in a document that is difficult to parse sounded very appealing to me, and thus I embarked on my journey to learn everything about it that I could. If you were to ask me what I like most about it now, it would probably be a tie between the “you don’t pay for what you don’t use” principle and zero cost generics. With regard to standardization, I do a lot of standardese...

The Lesser HTTP Refactor Aside from the normal answering of queries and issues, February has been a month dominated by the difference between the asio::DynamicBuffer_v1 and asio::DynamicBuffer_v2 concepts. As I understand things, both Beast and Asio libraries developed the idea of the DynamicBuffer concept (or more correctly, Named Type Requirement [NTR]) at roughly the same time, but with slightly different needs. The original Asio DyanmicBuffer describes a move-only type, designed to be a short-lived wrapper over storage which would allow a composed operation to easily manage data insertions or retrievals from that storage through models of the MutableBufferSequence and ConstBufferSequence NTRs. In Beast, it was found that DynamicBuffer objects being move-only caused a difficultly, because the necessarily complex composed operations in Beast need to create a DynamicBuffer, perform operations on it, pass it to a sub-operation for further manipulation and then continue performing operations on the same buffer. If the DynamicBuffer as been passed by move to a sub operation, then before the buffer can be used again, it will have to be moved back to the caller by the callee. Rather than complicate algorithms, Beast’s authors took a slightly different track - Beast DynamicBuffers were specified to be pass-by-reference....

History This is my first entry on the C++ Alliance web site. I’m very happy to say that I was invited to join the organisation at the end of December last year. I first met Vinnie on Slack when I chose to use Boost.Beast in a greenfield project - a highly scalable market data distribution system and quoting gateway for the Japanese cryptocurrency exchange liquid.com. There were a number of candidates for C++ HTTP frameworks and it is interesting for me to examine the decision-making process I went through in choosing one. If I am honest, there are two main factors that influenced me towards Boost.Beast: I am a long-time fanboi of Boost.Asio. I find it’s paradigm very pleasing. Once you decipher the (extremely terse!) documentation it becomes obvious that it was written by a hyper-intelligent extraterrestrial masquerading as a human being. I have used the Boost Library (or more correctly, libraries) for many years. Boost has become synonymous with trust, quality and dependability. As far as I have always been concerned, boost is the standard. The standard library has always been a pale shadow of it. When I started the new project there was an expectation that I would...

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There are four main areas where I spend my time. Libc++, where I am the “code owner” WG21, where I am the chair of the Library Working Group (LWG) Boost Speaking at conferences Lots of work these month(s) behind the scenes, getting stuff ready for C++20, LLVM 9, and Boost 1.71.0. Libc++ The LLVM 9.0 release has shipped! The release date was 19-September, a few days later than planned. There are a lot of new libc++ features in the release. As the “code owner” for libc++, I also have to review the contributions of other people to libc++, and evaluate and fix bugs that are reported. That’s a never-ending task; there are new contributions ever day. Many times, bug reports are based on misunderstandings, but require a couple of hours of work in order to figure out where the misunderstanding lies. We’re working on a major redesign of the “debug mode” for libc++, after we realized that the existing (not widely used) debug mode is useless when you’re trying to do things at compile (constexpr) time. I have been spending a lot of time the last few weeks working on the calendaring stuff in <chrono>, specifically the interface with the...

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Boost.Beast I’ve started working on improvements to the zlib part of Beast. There are some gaps in the test harness of these components, so I’ve decided to increase coverage. As a first step, I started porting test cases from the original zlib library’s tests, to verify that existing code matches the expected behavior of the original library. Fortunately, I’ve not found any significant discrepancies, there’s only one issue where Beast rejects malformed input for the wrong reason (I’m still looking into it whether it’s actually an issue at the time of writing this). I’ve also looked into providing more meaningful feedback from test failures in Beast, especially when they’re run in CI. While the current test framework does print a line number on failure, the line number is often in a function template that’s called by multiple test cases, which makes it quite hard to determine which test failed just from the log, often requiring the use of a debugger. Doing that locally may not be a problem, but it’s significantly harder in CI, so I’ve decided to try to use Boost Stacktrace to provide a callstack on each failure in Beast tests. Additionally, I’ve also worked on running the...

There are four main areas where I spend my time. Libc++, where I am the “code owner” WG21, where I am the chair of the Library Working Group (LWG) Boost Speaking at conferences This month, the big news (and the big work item) was the approval of the C++ “Committee Draft” at the WG21 meeting in Cologne on July 15-20. You can think of this as a “beta version” of the C++20 standard; all features are complete. The next step is bug fixing, with an eye towards releasing next year. Libc++ The LLVM 9.0 release is on track for September. We have a release branch, and the RC1 was recently dropped. Because of the run-up and the aftermath of the Cologne meeting, the libc++ accomplishments are a bit sparse this month. As the “code owner” for libc++, I also have to review the contributions of other people to libc++, and evaluate and fix bugs that are reported. That’s a never-ending task; there are new contributions ever day. LWG issues resolved this month in libc++ (almost certainly incomplete) LWG2273 regex_match ambiguity LLVM features implemented this month (almost certainly incomplete) P1612 Relocate endian P1466 Parts of P1466 “Misc Chrono fixes” more to...

This month I’ve been working on the following projects: Certify Boost.Beast Certify After quite a bit of work exploring ways to make certificate verification more complete, I’ve concluded that Boost is currently missing a few tools to make that viable. A comprehensive solution requires, at the very least, a functional HTTP client able to handle higher-level semantics like redirects, proxies or compressed bodies. While these are unlikely to happen while performing an OCSP query or downloading a CRL set from Google’s update service, they still need to be handled, otherwise the user will be left in a no better state than when no library is used. At this point, Certify only offers basic verification, but that is still simillar level to what cURL does. Providing a comprehensive solution will require either a infrastructure solution (something like Google’s CRLsets) or a library based one (i.e. build up all the required libraries to be able to perform proper certificate status checks). Boost.Beast I’ve continued the work on expanding split compilation in Beast, by turning some internal function templates, in websocket code, into regular functions. Additionally, I’ve simplified the websocket prng code after proving with some benchmarks that the previous solution made it...

There are four main areas where I spend my time. Libc++, where I am the “code owner” WG21, where I am the chair of the Library Working Group (LWG) Boost Speaking at conferences Libc++ The next big milestone for libc++ is the LLVM 9.0 release this summer. We’re working towards that, implementing new features and fixing bugs. The “Branch for release” is currently scheduled for July 18th. As the “code owner” for libc++, I also have to review the contributions of other people to libc++, and evaluate and fix bugs that are reported. That’s a never-ending task; there are new contributions ever day. I created a status page for the LWG issues and papers that are already set up for a vote at the Cologne WG21 meeting. LWG issues resolved this month in libc++ (almost certainly incomplete) LWG2221 No formatted output operator for nullptr LWG3206 year_month_day conversion to sys_days uses not-existing member function LLVM features implemented this month (almost certainly incomplete) P0553 Bit operations P0556 Integral power-of-2 operations P1355 Exposing a narrow contract for ceil2 P0646 Improving the Return Value of Erase-Like Algorithms I LLVM bugs resolved this month (probably incomplete) Bug 41843 std::is_base_of should give correct result for incomplete...

This month I’ve been working on the following projects: Certify Boost.Beast Boost.Build Certify This month, I’ve worked on expanding the documentation of Certify, especially the example and introduction parts. When looking through the documentation for Boost.Build I found out it’s possible to import snippets from *.cpp files into the documentation, which will allow me to make sure that snippets in the documentation compile and are tested. I’ve also attempted cleaning up the Certify build script to use the OpenSSL module in b2, but I ran into issues, so I’ll have get back to this one in the future. Don’t forget to star the repository: https://github.com/djarek/certify! Boost.Beast I’ve been able to complete the port of the Beast CI to Azure Pipelines and expand the test matrix beyond what was tested in the existing CI infrastructure. Thanks to the expanded concurrent job limit, a full run on AzP takes less time than a full Travis and Appveyor build, especially when wait times are taken into accout. One of the matrix items I added were tests for header-only no-deprecated builds, which turned out to be broken. Untested code has a nasty tendency to rot. I’ve also been able to identify some function templates...

There are four main areas where I spend my time. Libc++, where I am the “code owner” WG21, where I am the chair of the Library Working Group (LWG) Boost Speaking at conferences Libc++ The next big milestone for libc++ is the LLVM 9.0 release this summer. We’re working towards that, implementing new features and fixing bugs. As the “code owner” for libc++, I also have to review the contributions of other people to libc++, and evaluate and fix bugs that are reported. That’s a never-ending task; there are new contributions ever day. This month was spent concentrating on code reviews and bug reports; so I implemented very little “new code”. There was a lot of “infrastructure work” done on libc++ this month; a large cleanup of the test suite (still in progress), a bunch of work on debug mode for the library (also still in progress) LWG issues resolved this month in libc++ 2960 sub_match::swap only swaps the base class LLVM features implemented this month (certainly incomplete) Improved the behavior of the compiler intrinsic __is_base_of. Clang no longer generates an error when you ask about inheritance relationships with unions, even if the non-union class is incomplete. This intrinsic is...

This month I’ve been working on the following projects: Certify Boost.Beast Boost.Build BeastLounge Certify Certify did not have any platform-independent means of caching certificate status (i.e. revoked, valid, unknown), so I implemented one. For now it has to be manually filled, but I’ll add a way to import a static blacklist (somewhat similar to the builtin blacklist in Chrome) and query the status of a certificate. Unfortunately there is no way to handle OCSP stapling within the verification callback invoked by OpenSSL which is quite detrimental to usability. Additionally, OpenSSL doesn’t have a way of starting and waiting for an asynchronous operation within callbacks (without blocking). Don’t forget to star the repository: https://github.com/djarek/certify! Boost.Beast When working on making sure Beast is std::launder-correct, I ran into a number of previously undiagnosed bugs in Beast. All of them have been fixed in v254. I was quite confused why these issues weren’t found by CI previously. I’ve been able to track it down to old toolchain versions in Travis. Additionally, the test matrix lacks a few fairly important variants. Considering the fact that Trusty is no longer supported and the switch to Xenial is inevitable, I’ve decided to port over the CI to...

There are four main areas where I spend my time. Libc++, where I am the “code owner” WG21, where I am the chair of the Library Working Group (LWG) Boost Speaking at conferences Libc++ The next big milestone for libc++ is the LLVM 9.0 release this summer. We’re working towards that, implementing new features and fixing bugs. As the “code owner” for libc++, I also have to review the contributions of other people to libc++, and evaluate and fix bugs that are reported. That’s a never-ending task; there are new contributions ever day. LWG papers implemented this month. P0811 Add std::midpoint and std::lerp for C++20 LWG issues resolved this month 2960 nonesuch is insufficiently useless 2977 unordered_meow::merge() has incorrect Throws: clause 2164 What are the semantics of vector.emplace(vector.begin(), vector.back())? LLVM features implemented this month (certainly incomplete) Fixed the implementations of list::remove_if and list::unique to deal with values or predicates that are elements in the list. Same for forward_list. We did this for remove already, but now we do it for the other operations as well. Added a bunch of new tests for things that we were missing ** list::sort and forward_list::sort are required to be stable. ** You can’t use...

This month I’ve been working on the following projects: Certify Boost.Beast Boost.Build BeastLounge Certify Certify now properly verifies the hostname of a TLS server according to RFC 2818 or TLS-DANE if available. Additionally, initial support for CRLSets has been merged, although it’s still missing integration into the verification code. I’ve also invested a fair bit of time into researching what other open source libraries do to perform certificate status checking. I’ve looked into BoringSSL, mbedTLS, Botan and even the Go standard library. It’s interesting that no library has a default way of performing the status check of a certificate and it’s left up to the user. The Windows implementation of the certificate store in Certify will now properly use the entire chain passed by the peer, which resolves certificate failures in less common cases. Don’t forget to star the repository: https://github.com/djarek/certify! Boost.Beast Most of the work this month involved making Beast compile faster and use less memory by expanding the code that can use split compilation and reducing redundant dependencies in a few places. Boost.Build I’ve worked on implementing 2 improvements that make it less painful to work with b2: support for finding OpenSSL support for sanitizers in gcc and...

There are four main areas where I spend my time. Libc++, where I am the “code owner” WG21, where I am the chair of the Library Working Group (LWG) Boost Speaking at conferences This month, I spent far more time reviewing other people’s code and preparing talks for conferences than the previous few months. The Boost release process consumed a fair chunk of time as well. Libc++ The big news is: we released LLVM 8 this month! (March 20th). You can get the sources and pre-built binaries from the LLVM download page, or wait for your system vendor to provide you with an update. As the “code owner” for libc++, I also have to review the contributions of other people to libc++, and evaluate and fix bugs that are reported. That’s a never-ending task; there are new contributions ever day. LWG papers implemented this month. P0811 std::midpoint for integral and pointer types. This turned out to be quite involved, and spawned a clang bug report. On the plus side, now I have a topic for a talk for CppCon this fall. Still to do, std::midpoint for floating point types. This is done, but it needs better tests. LWG issues implemented...

Certify - X509 certificate validation I always knew that validating a certificate chain presented by a peer is not an easy procedure, but my recent work in Certify to port over the procedure from Chromium has only proven that I underestimated the complexity of it. Certificate revocation seems to be a particularly hard issue, with 2 main categories of solutions - offline and online validation. Online validation - OCSP OCSP is a protocol designed to allow checking the revocation status of a certificate by sending a request over a subset of HTTP/1.1. At first glance, it seems it solves the status checking problem on its own. However, OCSP has problems, inherent to online checking. First of all, the validation server might not be currently available - so a lack of response is most definitely not a state in which a chain can be trusted. Secondly, the check may be slow, after all, it requires connecting to a separate service. Additionally, the native Windows API for certificate verification does the status check synchronously, which means potentially blocking a user’s thread that typically services asynchronous operations. There is a feature that alleviates most of these issues, at least from the point of...

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Monthly update (or, what Marshall did in January and February) There are four main areas where I spend my time. Libc++, where I am the “code owner” WG21, where I am the chair of the Library Working Group (LWG) Boost Speaking at conferences Libc++ The LLVM “branch for release” occurred in January, and there was a bit of a rush to get things into the LLVM 8 release. Now that is over, and we’re just watching the test results, seeing if anyone finds any problems with the release. I don’t anticipate any, but you never know. As the “code owner” for libc++, I also have to review the contributions of other people to libc++, and evaluate and fix bugs that are reported. That’s a never-ending task; there are new contributions ever day. After the branch, I started working on new features for the LLVM 9 release (for this summer). More calendaring stuff, new C++20 features, and some C++17 features that haven’t been done yet. LWG papers implemented in Jan/Feb P0355: Extending to Calendars and Time Zones. You may remember this from last month's update; this is a huge paper, and I am landing it in stages. P1024: tuple-like interface to...

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Monthly update (or, what Marshall did in December) There are three main areas where I spend my time. Boost Libc++ WG21, where I am the chair of the Library Working Group (LWG) Boost: December was a big month for boost, and much of the first part of the month was taken up with the release process. I was the release manager for the 1.69.0 release, which went live on 12-December. The final release process was fairly straighforward, with only one release candidate being made/tested - as opposed to the beta, which took three. In any case, we had a successful release, and the I (and other boost developers) are now happily working on features/bug fixes for the 1.70 release - which will occur in March. Libc++: After the WG21 meeting in November, there was a bunch of new functionality to be added to libc++. The list of new features (and their status) can be seen on the libc++ website. My major contributions of new features in December were Consistent Container Erasure, char8_t: A type for UTF-8 characters and strings, and Should Span be Regular?, and a big chunk of [Extending to Calendars and Time Zones](https://wg21.link/P0355R7). This is all pointing towards...

WG21 San Diego Meeting Last week was the fall 2018 WG21 standard committee meeting. It was held in San Diego, which is my hometown. The fact that I helped organize it (while I was working at Qualcomm) had absolutely no affect on the location, I assure you. ;-) This was the largest WG21 meeting ever, with 180 attendees. The last meeting (in Rapperswil, Switzerland) had about 150 attendees, and that was the largest one until now. There were more than 270 papers in the pre-meeting mailing; meaning that people were spending weeks reading papers to prepare for the meeting. Herb Sutter (the convener) has been telling everyone that new papers received after the San Diego meeting were out of scope for C++20, and apparently people took him at his word. This was my first meeting representing the C++ Alliance (though hardly my first overall). The Alliance was well represented, with Rene, Glen, Vinnie, Jon and myself attending. For information about how WG21 is structured, please see isocpp.org. I spent all of my time in LWG, since that’s the group that I chair, and the one that has the most influence over libc++, the library that I work on. The big...

Initial work on Certify complete It’s been mentioned in my initial blog post that I’d be working on a TLS certificate store abstraction library, with the intent of submitting it for formal review for Boost, at some point in the (hopefully near) future. The initial setup phase (things that every Software Engineer hates) is more or less complete. CI setup was a bit tricky - getting OpenSSL to run with the boost build system on both Windows and Linux (and in the future MacOS) has provided a lot of “fun” thanks to the inherent weirdness of OpenSSL. The test harness currently consists of two test runners that loads certificates from a database (big name for a folder structure stored in git) that has the certificate chains divided into two groups. Chains that will fail due to various reasons (e.g. self-signed certificates, wrong domain name) and ones that will pass (when using a valid certificate store). I’m still working on checking whether the failure was for the expected reason. All the verification is done offline (i.e. no communication with external servers is performed, only chain verification). At this point it looks like I should consider, whether the current design of the...

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Damian Jarek joins the Alliance as Staff Engineer. Previously he worked on a number of embedded networking projects for a few major clients. As a Staff Engineer he’ll be working on an open-source companion library for Boost.Beast and Boost.Asio, which will abstract away the platform-specific details of acessing system proxy settings and performing TLS verification of a peer certificate chain using the operating system’s key store.

Marshall Clow joins the Alliance as a Staff Engineer. Previously, he worked at Qualcomm for many years. Most of his time is spent working on libc++, the C++ standard library implementation for LLVM. He is also a member of the C++ standards committee, currently serving as the chair of LWG, the library working group. Marshall has been contributing to the Boost libraries since 2001, and is the author of the Boost.Algorithm library. Furthermore he maintains several other boost libraries, and moderates some of the boost mailing lists. Finally, Marshall has graciously taken on the role of release manager for several Boost versions.

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The Alliance is a Gold sponsor for C++Now 2018. This conference is a gathering of C++ experts and enthusiasts from around the world in beautiful Aspen, Colorado.

A new corporate logo is adopted from the conclusion of a contest on Designhill:

Vinnie Falco joins the Alliance board of directors as president.

René Rivera joins the Alliance board of directors as secretary.

Jon Kalb joins the Alliance board of directors as treasurer.

Glen Joseph Fernandes, a Boost C++ library author, contributor, maintainer, joins as a technical advisor.

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The Alliance engages Foundation Group, a non-profit formation and compliance services company. Foundation Group delivers a comprehensive 501(c)(3) registration service with a 100% IRS approval rate.

Jens Weller, the organizer and founder of Meeting C++, joins the Alliance as an advisor.

Louis Tatta joins the Alliance in the role of Chief Executive Officer, to oversee and administer the day to day operations of the company and carry out the mission.

The C++ Alliance, Inc. officially incorporates as a California 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. The company is administered entirely as a virtual entity with no physical office.

Beast, an HTTP and WebSocket protocol library written in C++11, becomes part of the Boost library collection.