Re: Replacement for MS STL?
"Garry W" <ListMail3@extremelyserious.org> wrote in message
news:3rg4h2lafjdds8hg966l5l5630s6a43dv0@4ax.com...
Anybody know of any really fresh and clean STL implementation out there?
Hasn't been a new one for years. Alexandrescu began YASLI (Yet Another
Standard Library Implementation) nearly five years ago. It's goal was
to redo the Standard C++ library properly, using what we had learned
about template metaprogramming, etc. You can read the entire history
of that project at:
http://www.stlport.com/cgi-bin/forum/dcboard.cgi
It peaked out at several postings a year [sic]. Hasn't been a new
one in 2006.
I need something like the STL for a big new project that I've started in
on.
And I've given up on the Microsoft implementation. When I tried to use it
I
immediately fell over several bugs in it that took a lot of time to find.
And
working with it has been really difficult because the code is kind of
illegible. At least for the uninitiated. (Apologies if there are authors
here!)
He is.
So I've been "rolling my own", as the need arises. I can tune to serve my
needs, and I have a (greater) prayer of figuring out the bugs and of
understanding those lovely VStudio template error messages. But rolling my
own, and making it right, is getting to be too much of a time-consuming
process too.
Perhaps you're beginning to understand why you have to suffer those
fools who write commercial software you have to use. BTW, did you
report any of those bugs you found, so they might get fixed?
I did download StlPort back at the beginning of the problems. But I
quickly
discovered that StlPort doesn't compile (yet) under VStudio 8 (2005). And
it's so heavily encrusted with preprocessor stuff that it's rather hard to
work with too. The coding has much of the same "encryption".
STLport is also moribund. stlport.org gave up on it years ago,
leaving it to a couple of determined volunteers to keep it going.
See:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/stlport
for their ongoing efforts. We test it regularly, and found that it
hasn't improved in compliance (or correctness) for the past several
years.
Anything else out there that's nice? Doesn't need to be free. Doesn't need
to
follow the STL spec as long as it does many of the equivalent things. Does
there exist a "super sweet" STL (or equiv) for Visual Studio?
You might also check out:
http://incubator.apache.org/stdcxx
It's the old Rogue Wave library made open source and hosted by
Apache. And if you're a traditionalist, there's still:
http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/
which is the original STL from H-P reworked by the very capable
Matt Austern while he was at SGI. Or even:
http://www.recursionsw.com/cplus.htm
Recursion Sowtware's STL Toolkit is the remains of the old
ObjectSpace implementation.
The best free implementation of STL these days comes with
libstdc++, which ships with gcc. The only problem is, you
have a nontrivial porting job to get it to work with VC++.
There's only one commercial supplier of Standard C and C++
libraries left today, and that's Dinkumware, Ltd. Our latest
product, the Dinkum Compleat Libraries, works out of the box
with V6 through V8 and provides the only full implementation
of TR1 (which will be a large chunk of the next Standard C++
library). But it's written by the same folks who brought
you the buggy, unreadable code you're trying to avoid, so
you might not want to try it.
thanks much -
Garry
PS - If anyone is interested, I started building a "de-mystifier" for the
MS
code, to translate the mysterious internal names over to ones that more
resemble English words. Helped me with the debugging.
Glad to hear it.
P.J. Plauger
Dinkumware, Ltd.
http://www.dinkumware.com