Subject: RE: Why We Should Use the STL (fwd)
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Jun 05 2000 - 07:53:01 CDT
On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, James Montgomerie wrote:
>
> The university provides an old (i.e. pre-egcs) version of gcc, and that's
> what I have to use. It makes some attempts at being STL compliant, but it's
> not. There are little differences. There are some /large/ differences (no
> namespace support).
Ahh that's right. That's the reason the gnome group dropped the mico orb
and gave up on C++. It took KDE another 1.5 years to realize that mico
wasn't going to it for them either. It is also the reason our BELLE code
wouldn't work on the Vendor C++ compilers.
I'd predict that, should we go down the STL route, it
> will be very hard to support these 'couple of generations old' compilers
> (and, despite what soma are thinking, this /is/ important.
>
This is a powerful argument. While it is obvious that speed is important
I'm almost sure that we won't notice the difference of speeding up
UT_Vector by a factor of 26. That's not the bottleneck.
> People like me, using Linux at University and compiling their own copies of
> AbiWord, are /important/ to 'the cause'. They're the people that are
> 'spreading the word' about Abiword (it's amazing how many poeple are using
> AbiWord at uni now - at busy project times it's not unknown for about a
> quarter of the computers to be running AbiWord - this despite the fact that
> people could easily go upstairs and use Word).
>
That's really cool :-) The next generation uses our code :-)
Cheers
Martin
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