Investigate use of optionals as return type of BufferingSystem::get_data

[Victor-C-Zhang]

The current pattern bool get_data(data_ret_t& data) is non-idiomatic. In an ideal code style world, we should be returning optionals. But to do so we should investigate the performance difference between the two methods and resolve the issue of introducing a duplicate dependency on Boost in both the buffering and streaming repos.

Evan:

Yeah but avoiding multiple installations of the same dependency is for some reason non-trivial. For instance we have to install gtest twice.