Subject: Re: Why We Should Use the STL (fwd)
From: sam th (sam@uchicago.edu)
Date: Sun Jun 04 2000 - 12:47:46 CDT
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On Sun, 4 Jun 2000, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
> Well, I'm pleasently suprized that an AbiWord developer would even suggest
> such a contraversial change.
>
> I agree 100%. Speed is very important, even in desktop programs. It is
> pointless to slow down some parts of the program by 23 times just because
> of a fear of templates.
>
> Another issue I would like to raise is standards. The point of STL is
> having a standard so that applications do not have to implement their own,
> mediocre, simple types. This is what AbiWord has done. By all means,
> AbiWord should use the standard, not only for speed, but so that C++
> developers don't have to learn yet another type library. Using STL would
> mean that we wouldn't have to maintain or support the UT_* classes,
> because they would be replaced by faster, better, more standard
> equivilents.
>
> I really hope this doesn't get vetoed by the luddites ( :) ) on this list.
> Now, who's going to write this huge patch? ;-)
>
> Aaron Lehmann
>
Well, it's good to know people agree with me.
Fortunately, the patch is not that huge. We would just have to make our
current UT_Vector implementatation be a wrapper for the STL vector<>. We
don't duplicate that many types from the STL, really only stack, hash and
vector (I don't know if the STL provides bytebuf, but I don't think
it does). We can't replace string, since STL doesn't support Unicode the
way we do.
Now I realize that this is unlikely to be neccessary for getting 1.0 out,
but the speed will be nice, and I should have UT_Vector hacked this week.
sam th
sam@uchicago.edu
http://sam.rh.uchicago.edu
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