Dmitry Arkhipov

Back in April my former colleague Christian Mazakas has announced his work on registry of nightly Boost packages for vcpkg . That same month Conan developers have introduced a new feature that significantly simplified providing of an alternative Conan package source.

Most of my work during the first quarter of this year involved experimenting with things which haven’t yet reached the state where it would be interesting to discuss them. But there was a project that at this point is reaching its finish, and thus let’s focus on it.

While some of my work in the third quarter of this year was dedicated to more work on Boost.JSON and Docca, the most interesting thing was definitely pretty_printers , a collection of utilities and build scripts which help dealing with debugger pretty printers and visualisers.

In the second quarter of 2024 implementing direct parsing for Boost.JSON has finally been completed. Direct serialisation will support all the same types as direct parsing, including recently-added std::path .

In the first quarter of 2024 I mostly continued with work on direct serialization, cleanup work in Boost.JSON, and experiments with its JSON parser and serialiser. The experiments have resulted in discovery of a significant performance pessimization in the parser.

In the fourth quarter of 2023 the functionality for direct parsing in JSON was finalised and the code was merged into the mainline and then released in Boost 1.84.0. Thus, I’ve moved to the natural opposite of direct parsing: direct serialisation.

In the third quarter my work was mostly focused on improvements to JSON’s conversion features. In Boost.JSON conversion between user types and library containers is done with value_to and value_from functions. Conversions of composite types are attempted recursively.

In January 2021 I started working on improving Boost.JSON for The C++ Alliance. The time during this first month was mostly spent on getting familiar with the project, particularly with its list of issues on GitHub.