Is UDF source viewable, and where do they reside?

[JohnOne]

As far as AutoIt goes, Imagesearchdll is a third party library, anyone can maintain it, even you, go ahead, I'm sure a couple of people would appreciate it.

[RTFC]

@mrubin: bit of a late rejoinder on my part, because these days I tend to catch up with forum discussions mainly during extended breaks from work (which is part of the point I'd like to make. From your remarks so far I get the impression that your interpretation of how this community works is a little off (which is totally understandable, of course, since you've only just joined). I know the Boost template libraries; I use them myself, and I have the greatest respect for its systematic approach and rigorous testing cycles. But that's just not the way things work around here. We have about 65K members in the English-language forum alone (with partial overlap in other-language AutoIt forums), with a huge diversity in skills and expertise. Moreover, some of the most gifted and/or productive contributors are not necessarily professional software engineers at all, but maybe work in music production, or graphic design, or academia, or turn out to be teenagers still in school. Part of what makes this environment so stimulating, surprising, multi-faceted, and (at times) inspiring is that broad mix of talents and backgrounds. But you simply cannot expect people that have day jobs completely unrelated to their voluntary software-developmental activiities in their spare time to be subjected to the kind of versioning control, unit testing, refactoring, and repository maintenance regimes that you propose. New (versions of) particular UDFs will appear if and when people discover/fix bugs, or require new functionality themselves, or just because it can be done, or it seems like a fun or cool challenge, but not because the latest compiler for platform X suddenly throws a fit, or UDF A by member B does not play nice with UDF C by member D. Everybody can make their own building blocks that may or may not be useful to others; some are ten lines long, some are ten thousand. When I write a dll, I do provide the source, but other people may not, and that's okay, because it's up to other users to decide whether they want to go the provided route or use something else, or develop their own ideas, or take existing ones in new directions (check out how many different IPC solutions have been proposed  by various people, for example).

My point is, that freedom of how and when and where to contribute (if at all) is very much part of the appeal, and also helps to create an unusually generous atmosphere among many members. Spend some time on the example scripts forum, and you'll see many posts by first-time comtributors saying something like: "I wanted to give something back." If you were to subject that impulse to stringent formatting and compatibility requirements, I reckon you'd get a mere fraction of the breadth of contributions we now see. UDF standards are available for those that want theirs to become part of the AutoIt core (e.g., Yashied's phenomenal _WInAPIex contributions, for example), but personally, I wouldn't have made any contribution myself if I'd have to comply with those standards, yet I know my (somewhat idiosyncratic) codes are useful to some, and positive feedback is part of what makes it worthwhile.

None of this is to be taken as criticism of your point of view, but I wanted to highlight that the my perspective from here is a little different from the Boost environment one. If you stick around, you may come to enjoy it too.

Edited January 3, 2016 by RTFC
typos