Re: Announcing Xrtti - Extended Runtime Type Information for C++
On May 3, 8:53 am, bji-gg...@ischo.com wrote:
I do appreciate your point though; I am conflicted between my
agreement that the software development world needs more consolidation
and less fragmentation; and thus really I should be using the standard
libraries instead of inventing my own, and my fundamental issues with
the design of C++ STL, and to a lesser extent, with the design of
Boost (which relies far far too much on template-based programming for
my liking. Also, the one time I tried to use it it left a bad taste
in my mouth because it was such a big library and my particular
installation must have had flaws (even though it was a standard RedHat
package) because I got link errors in Boost that I could not resolve).
This is an issue that seems to be increasingly the basis of
conversation regarding C++. A programmer goes off and writes a very
nice framework, and uses his/her own library (primitive elements) to
support that framework. The reason often given is that "it is more
pleasant to use than STL". For example, Mirek Fidler did this with U+
+ ( http://www.ultimatepp.org/) and some of us have done this in our
own, less ambitious works. But because the primitives are just that,
primitive, there will be inevitably type mismatch for the users of the
various components. Simple things like trying to use a list template
becomes a problem, because there might be three different list<>
classes in the same program, and they do not just get along, even
though they are conceptually very similar.
I think what might have helped with this problem was the notion of a
"super library", a library so broad in scope that it includes 95% + of
every primitive conceivable, including containers, string, time-
related, etc. It would include a tree<> class for example. In some
cases, there would be the need to model inherently-platform specific
primitives, like mutexes, semaphores, and waiting for multiple
synchronization objects simultaneously. I think *if*, we could
imagine all these primitives, say 500 of them, working together, but
still being primitives and not higher-level components, the the
imagination of such would force a governing theme that has the
peculiar of effect of being "sufficiently pleasurable and acceptable
so as to discourage their recreation."
-Le Chaud Lapin-
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