Re: [boost] interest in a flag library

Subject: Re: [boost] interest in a flag library
From: Vicente J. Botet Escriba (vicente.botet_at_[hidden])
Date: 2018-11-01 07:24:05

Le 26/10/2018 à 10:08, Hans Dembinski via Boost a écrit :
>> On 26. Oct 2018, at 09:35, Andrzej Krzemienski via Boost <boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>>
>> Hi. I would use a type-safe library for flags. I am missing one today.
> […]
>> I would rather expect an interface using named functions or indexing
>> operator:
>>
>> ```
>> if (!flags[Flag::READ])
>>   flags.reset(Flag::EXEC);
>> ```
> There are std::bitset (fixed size, allocates on the stack) and boost::dynamic_bitset (dynamic size, allocates from stack and heap)
>
> https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_68_0/libs/dynamic_bitset/dynamic_bitset.html
>
> The latter also has more sensible implementations of operator& and operator|. Before you invent a new thing, what is wrong with these classes?
>
Their size. The size of std::bitset<8> is not 8 bits but very often 64 
bits. :(

We need something like std::bitset<N>, where we can define the size of 
the block xxx::bitset<20, unsigned char>.

The size of xxx::bitset<20, unsigned char> should be 3 bytes.

Aside this point relative to the size, there is also the fact that 
std::bitset<N> uses only index between 0 and N-1.

I've defined a ordinal library where the index is not a number between 0 
and N-1, but any type that is isomorphic to O..N-1.

https://github.com/viboes/std-make/tree/master/include/experimental/fundamental/v3/ordinal

This library defines several container and in particular an ordinal_set
https://github.com/viboes/std-make/blob/master/include/experimental/fundamental/v3/ordinal/containers/ordinal_set.hpp

but also an ordinal array
https://github.com/viboes/std-make/blob/master/include/experimental/fundamental/v3/ordinal/containers/ordinal_array.hpp

and an ordinal range

You can find a draft proposal here
https://github.com/viboes/std-make/blob/master/doc/proposal/ordinal/Ordinal.md

In particular enums with power of 2 constants are isomorphic to 0..N-1.

Unfortunately ordinal_set<O> when the cardinality of O is 24 is not 3 
bytes as I use std::bitset as underlying implementation.

I started an implementation of a bitmask that has a builtin unsigned int 
underlying representation in

https://github.com/viboes/std-make/blob/master/include/experimental/fundamental/v3/bits/bit_mask.hpp

but I have not put both together.

Please, be free to take whatever could be useful to you.

Hopping this helps,
Vicente