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v2.1.3 29th April 2020 (Boost 1.73) [release]

Enhancements:

Performance of Outcome-based code compiled by clang has been greatly improved

The previous implementation of Outcome’s status bitfield confused clang’s optimiser, which caused low quality codegen. Unlike most codegen issues, this was noticeably in empirical benchmarks of real world code, as was shown by P1886 Error speed benchmarking.

The safe part of the better_optimisation Outcome v2.2.0 future branch was merged to Outcome v2.1.3 which includes a new status bitfield implementation. This appears to not confuse clang’s optimiser, and clang 9 produces code which routinely beats GCC 9’s code for various canned use cases.

Precompiled headers are automatically enabled on new enough cmake’s for standalone Outcome

If on cmake 3.16 or later, its new precompiled headers build support is used to tell consumers of the outcome::hl cmake target to precompile Outcome, if and only if PROJECT_IS_DEPENDENCY is false. PROJECT_IS_DEPENDENCY is set by Outcome’s CMakeLists.txt if it detects that it was included using add_subdirectory(), so for the vast majority of Outcome end users, the use of precompiled headers will NOT be enabled.

Exported targets do NOT request precompilation of headers, as it is assumed that importers of the Outcome cmake targets will configure their own precompiled headers which incorporate Outcome.

Installability is now CI tested per commit

Due to installability of standalone Outcome (e.g. make install) breaking itself rather more frequently than is ideal, installability is now tested on CI per commit.

Coroutines support has been documented

The coroutines support added in v2.1.2 has now been properly documented.

Bug fixes:

#214

Newer Concepts implementing compilers were unhappy with the early check for destructibility of T and E, so removed template constraints, falling back to static assert which runs later in the type instantiation sequence.

#215

For standalone Outcome, CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE is now passed through during dependency superbuild. This should solve build issues for some embedded toolchain users.

#220

A false positive undefined behaviour sanitiser failure in some use cases of Experimental Outcome was worked around to avoid the failure message.

#221

Restored compatibility with x86 on Windows, which was failing with link errors. It was quite surprising that this bug was not reported sooner, but obviously almost nobody is using Outcome with x86 on Windows.

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v2.1.2 11th December 2019 (Boost 1.72) [release]

Enhancements:

Improved compatibility with cmake tooling

Standalone outcome is now make install-able, and cmake find_package() can find it. Note that you must separately install and find_package() Outcome’s dependency, quickcpplib, else find_package() of Outcome will fail.

Non-permissive parsing is now default in Visual Studio

The default targets in standalone Outcome’s cmake now enable non-permissive parsing. This was required partially because VS2019 16.3’s quite buggy Concepts implementation is unusuable in permissive parsing mode. Even then, lazy ADL two phase lookup is broken in VS2019 16.3 with /std:latest, you may wish to use an earlier language standard.

Breaking change!

The git submodule mechanism used by standalone Outcome of specifying dependent libraries has been replaced with a cmake superbuild of dependencies mechanism instead. Upon cmake configure, an internal copy of quickcpplib will be git cloned, built and installed into the build directory from where an internal find_package() uses it. This breaks the use of the unconfigured Outcome repo as an implementation of Outcome, one must now do one of:

1. Add Outcome as subdirectory to cmake build.
2. Use cmake superbuild (i.e. ExternalProject_Add()) to build and install Outcome into a local installation.
3. Use one of the single header editions.

Breaking change!

For standalone Outcome, the current compiler is now checked for whether it will compile code containing C++ Concepts, and if it does, all cmake consumers of Outcome will enable C++ Concepts. Set the cmake variable BOOST_OUTCOME_C_CONCEPTS_FLAGS to an empty string to prevent auto detection and enabling of C++ Concepts support occurring.

BOOST_OUTCOME_TRY operation now hints to the compiler that operation will be successful

P1886 Error speed benchmarking showed that there is considerable gain in very small functions by hinting to the compiler whether the expression is expected to be successful or not. BOOST_OUTCOME_TRY previously did not hint to the compiler at all, but now it does. A new suite of macros BOOST_OUTCOME_TRY_FAILURE_LIKELY hint to the compiler that failure is expected. If you wish to return to the previously unhinted behaviour, define BOOST_OUTCOME_TRY_LIKELY(expr) to (!!expr).

#199

Support for C++ Coroutines has been added. This comes in two parts, firstly there is now an BOOST_OUTCOME_CO_TRY() operation suitable for performing the TRY operation from within a C++ Coroutine. Secondly, in the header outcome/coroutine_support.hpp there are implementations of eager<OutcomeType> and lazy<OutcomeType> which let you more naturally and efficiently use basic_result or basic_outcome from within C++ Coroutines – specifically, if the result or outcome will construct from an exception pointer, exceptions thrown in the coroutine return an errored or excepted result with the thrown exception instead of throwing the exception through the coroutine machinery (which in current compilers, has a high likelihood of blowing up the program). Both eager<T> and lazy<T> can accept any T as well. Both have been tested and found working on VS2019 and clang 9.

#210

make_error_code() and make_exception_ptr() are now additionally considered for compatible copy and move conversions for basic_result<>. This lets you construct a basic_result<T, E> into a basic_result<T, error_code>, where E is a custom type which has implemented the ADL discovered free function error_code make_error_code(E), but is otherwise unrelated to error_code. The same availability applies for exception_ptr with make_exception_ptr() being the ADL discovered free function. basic_outcome<> has less support for this than basic_result<> in order to keep constructor count down, but it will accept via this mechanism conversions from basic_result<> and failure_type<>.

Bug fixes:

#184

The detection of [[nodiscard]] support in the compiler was very mildly broken.

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v2.1.1 19th August 2019 (Boost 1.71) [release]

Enhancements:

#184

As per request from Boost release managers, relocated version.hpp and revision.hpp into detail, and added the Boost licence boilerplate to the top of every source file which was missing one (I think). Also took the opportunity to run the licence restamping script over all Outcome, so copyright dates are now up to date.

#185

Add FAQ item explaining issue #185, and why we will do nothing to fix it right now.

#189

Refactored the BOOST_OUTCOME_TRY implementation to use more clarified customisation points capable of accepting very foreign inputs. Removed the std::experimental::expected<T, E> specialisations, as those are no longer necessary. Fixed the documentation for the customisation points which previously claimed that they are ADL discovered, which they are not. Added a recipe describing how to add in support for foreign input types.

#183

Added a separate motivation/plug_error_code specifically for Boost.

Bug fixes:

-

BOOST_OUTCOME_VERSION_MINOR hadn’t been updated to 1.

#181

Fix issue #181 where Outcome didn’t actually implement the strong swap guarantee, despite being documented as doing so.

#190

Fix issue #190 in Boost edition where unit test suite was not runnable from the Boost release distro.

#182

Fix issue #182 where trait::is_exception_ptr_available<T> was always true, thus causing much weirdness, like not printing diagnostics and trying to feed everything to make_exception_ptr().

#194

Fix issue #192 where the std::basic_outcome_failure_exception_from_error() was being defined twice for translation units which combine standalone and Boost Outcome’s.

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v2.1 12th Apr 2019 (Boost 1.70) [release]

• #180

  • success() and failure() now produce types marked [[nodiscard]].

• include/outcome/outcome.natvis is now namespace permuted like the rest of Outcome, so debugging Outcome based code in Visual Studio should look much prettier than before.

• #162

  • .has_failure() was returning false at times when it should have returned true.

• #152

  • GCC 5 no longer can compile Outcome at all due to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45607450/gcc5-nested-variable-template-is-not-a-function-template. Added explicit version trap for GCC 5 to say it can not work. Note this is not a breaking change, GCC 5 was never supported officially in any v2 Outcome.

• #150

  • BREAKING CHANGE result<T, E>, boost_result<T, E> and std_result<T, E> no longer implement hard UB on fetching a value from a valueless instance if E is a UDT, they now fail to compile with a useful error message. If you wish hard UB, use unchecked<T, E>, boost_unchecked<T, E> or std_unchecked<T, E> instead.

• #140

  • Fixed a nasty corner case bug where value type’s without a copy constructor but with a move constructor would indicate via traits that copy construction was available. Thanks to Microsoft’s compiler team for reporting this issue.

• Added experimental status_result and status_outcome based on experimental status_code.

• Boost edition is now 100% Boost, so defaults for result and outcome are boost::system::error_code::errc_t and boost::exception_ptr. Moreover, the test suite in the Boost edition now exclusively tests the Boost edition. One can, of course, freely use the standalone edition with Boost, and the Boost edition with std types.

• Renamed ADL discovered customisation point throw_as_system_error_with_payload() to outcome_throw_as_system_error_with_payload().

• #135

  • Added much clearer compile failure when user tries result<T, T> or outcome where two or more types are identical. Thanks to Andrzej Krzemieński for suggesting a technique which combines SFINAE correctness with the remaining ability for result<T, T> etc to be a valid type, but not constructible.

• #67

  • Fixed one of the oldest long open bugs in Outcome, that the noexcept unit tests failed on OS X for an unknown reason.

• #115

  • Outcome did not construct correctly from failure_type.

• Inexplicably outcome’s error + exception constructor had been removed. Nobody noticed during the Boost peer review, which is worrying seeing as that constructor is needed for one of the main advertised features to Boost!

• #107 and #116

  • operator== and operator!= now become disabled if the value, error and exception types do not implement the same operator.
  • Relatedly, both comparison operators simply didn’t work right. Fixed.

• #109

  • swap() now has correct noexcept calculation and now correctly orders the swaps to be whichever is the throwing swap first.

• Added reference dump of v2.1 ABI so we can check if ABI breakage detection works in the next set of changes, plus Travis job to check ABI and API compatibility per commit.

• #124

  • BOOST_OUTCOME_TRY is now overloaded and selects void or auto edition according to input parameter count.

• #120

  • Fix generation of double underscored temporary variables in BOOST_OUTCOME_UNIQUE_NAME, which is UB.

• #110

  • Separated result from its hard coded dependency on the <system_error> header.
  • Renamed result and outcome to basic_result and basic_outcome.
  • Renamed result.hpp into basic_result.hpp.
  • Moved <system_error> and <exception> dependent code into new std_result.hpp and std_outcome.hpp header files.
  • Added boost_result.hpp and boost_outcome.hpp which use Boost.System and Boost.Exception (these are result.hpp and outcome.hpp in the Boost edition).

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v2.0 18th Jan 2018 [release]

• Boost peer review edition. This is what was reviewed.
• Changelog from v1 can be found in the release notes for this release.