[Mpi-21] Relevance of C++ MPI binding of www.boost.org

[Doug Gregor]

On Apr 3, 2008, at 12:09 PM, Rolf Rabenseifner wrote:
> which relevance has the MPI C++ binding of Boost ( http://www.boost.org/ 
>  )?
> In the actual version 1.35
> http://www.boost.org/users/news/version_1_35_0
> one can find a "C++-friendly interface to the standard Message
> Passing Interface".
>
> The comment from boost:
> "Although there exist C++ bindings for MPI, they offer little  
> functionality over the C bindings."
>
> Is there any knowledge of whether in real C++ programming, whether
> the official C++ MPI binding or the C++ boost MPI binding is
> more often used in the C++ community?

Boost's C++ bindings have only been in an official Boost release for a  
few weeks, so there's no way that the user base is even a fraction of  
the user base of the official C++ bindings.  As such, these bindings  
would certainly not be ready for standardization.

And, as Jeff said, the MPI forum has already rejected "richer" object- 
oriented C++ bindings in favor of what we have now. I don't see any  
indication that this is going to change, and I don't think it should.  
We should not spend our time discussing bindings (or improved  
bindings) for every language out there. Rather, we should spend our  
time making sure that such bindings *can* be built on top of MPI's C  
or Fortran bindings. MPI is good at message passing, Python is good at  
being Python.

        - Doug