Where is boost-spirit 3? Is it abandoned?

Question

I can't find any download for boost spirit 3. Seems like the official website stopped talking about it at the end of December? Where did it go?

Consuetudinary

For reference: Spirit X3 3.0.2 boost.org/doc/libs/1_68_0/libs/spirit/doc/x3/html/index.html – Baliol

Answer 1

The source code is available on Github. Documentation is here. Quoting from the Blog:

C++ Now 2015. Today is the official release of Spirit X3, aka Spirit 3.0.0. X3 will be in beta, coexisting side by side with Qi, Karma, Lex and Classic.

According to Sehe (see comments), X3 was included in the Boost release at least as far back as November 2015. Since it's header only though, I figure you could just as easily download Spirit from Github.

If you look in the 'Include' section of the documentation (linked above), you'll read:

Spirit is a header file only library. There are no libraries to link to. To use Spirit X3 simply include:

#include <boost/spirit/home/x3.hpp> To distinguish between Spirit versions, you can inspect the version file:

#include <boost/spirit/home/x3/version.hpp> using the preprocessor define

SPIRIT_X3_VERSION It is a hex number where the first two digits determine the major version while the last two digits determine the minor version. For example:

#define SPIRIT_VERSION 0x3000 // version 3.0

Peek in Github and you'll find include/boost/spirit/home/x3. If you check the history of pull requests you'll see the project is very much alive. If you have doubts about the activity of the project, contact the team.

Microwave

Yes I found that, but question still is what happened to the project? – Consuetudinary

No activity since 2015? And the official boost release is still 2.5.2? Is Spirit 3 dead? Surely by now some updates would have happened... – Consuetudinary

@OliverK Oh I see, small update. The project is still active (check github PR's and source code update history) but with something like Spirit, I think you'll find it to be less actively edited than things that require less up-front design. – Microwave

One wonders why they don't just put the X3 docs together with the rest of the Spirit docs, as they ship X3 in Boost already. – Wershba

@FelixDombek having used boost for a number of years, I've found that the documentation is often a sore point. The libraries are great (albeit complex), but learning to use them is a matter of will-power. – Microwave

Come to like X3, but to bad the documentation for X3 does not match the code completely... Maybe they will implement some of the missing features in the future, hope someone will. Example missing documented X3 features: 'as<T>[]()[a]', or 'lazy(fp)' – Consuetudinary