Re: [boost] [Review] XInt Review

Subject: Re: [boost] [Review] XInt Review
From: Joel Falcou (joel.falcou_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-03-04 16:22:18

On 04/03/11 22:17, Marsh Ray wrote:
> Firstly, I believe in you expressing your opinion and value it.
>

Thanks :)

> But it'd still be nice to have a standard bigint facility in C++ or 
> Boost. But C++ seems like one of the last high-level languages without 
> basic bigints at this point. We have regexes now for heaven's sake, 
> integers were only conceived a few thousand years before!
>
> I'm concerned that perfect is the enemy of good enough here.

and I agree. Now, can we consider the proposal fits in the "good enough" ?

> Is it a requirement for Boost that every new library be 
> state-of-the-art in its use of compile time polymorphism?

Maybe, maybe not. Now, I remind you that Phoenix have been delayed as being
accepted into boost the first time, consensus being it has to use proto 
to be accepted.

> MSVC 8.0
> GCC 4.4

Well, at when do you start feeling "it compiles for too long" ? Template 
heavy coe is liek other code, it has to be well written to be fast, and 
here, fast to compile.

> It's a problem for me, the poor developer, when I have to use the 
> thing. Or not if I don't use it.
> But if no developers use it, the vendors don't make it a priority.
> Lots of numeric code is still written in C and Fortran. Whether that's 
> because of the compiler or the mind, the abstraction penalty is real.

It is real when said abstraction is sued willy-nilly.

> OK. Maybe expression templates aren't a big issue, I think I'm using 
> them happily with GMP's C++ interface. But I'd much rather be using 
> something in boost:: or std::trX::.

Well, if XInt actually provided range based interface and an extension 
mechanism for external big int representation, we could have a good start.