Issues with building Boost.Math into a standard library implementation

[frederick-vs-ja]

Currently MSVC STL builds Boost.Math into its static library, which cause the static library contains non-_Uglified linking symbols and causes non-conforming linking behavior. See microsoft/STL#362.

I'm trying to resolve this in Boost.Math by adding the BOOST_MATH_NAMESPACE macro

#ifndef BOOST_MATH_NAMESPACE
#define BOOST_MATH_NAMESPACE math
#endif

and then replace every occurrence of math which is a namespace with BOOST_MATH_NAMESPACE.

With the changes above, MSVC STL's special_math.cpp can define BOOST_MATH_NAMESPACE as _Math (or some other _Uglified identifier, e.g. __math__) before including <boost/math/*> and then use ::boost::BOOST_MATH_NAMESPACE::* to get rid of non-_Uglified symbols.

But the changes need to touch 500+ files in Boost.Math and make maintenance a bit harder (every namespace math should be spelt as BOOST_MATH_NAMESPACE later). Not sure whether this approach is OK.

[ckormanyos]

Hi @frederick-vs-ja this issue is also being tracked in #769. None of us has actually gotten around to progressing on it so far.

need to touch 500+

I believe we are generally aware of this and still consider the request to be reasonable.

I think we just need to discuss:

• Is this actually is the best approach.
• Who will actually do it (I wanted to give it a try, but find myself hopelessly busy with other projects)
• Should the outer namespace be only for standalone Math only or for all of Boost.Math's configs?
• When to do it?
• Does anything need to be done for Multiprecision? I suspect there might be some moderately harmless cross-talk to Multiprecision.

Cc: @jzmaddock and @mborland and @NAThompson