[boost] Re: C++ committee Library TR progress in Santa Cruz

From: David B. Held (dheld_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-11-01 13:51:25

James Curran wrote:

>     I wouldn't be surprised if some vendors removed all #ifdef's not 
> needed for their compiler.... And several vendors have written their 
> own STL's despite the original being available.

But how many compiler vendors write a standard library implementation 
for just their compiler?  All the SCL implementations I'm aware of are 
written by library vendors, not compiler vendors.  And they are all 
designed to work on multiple compilers.  So I don't see how removing 
portability is an improvement.  I suppose if there were significant QoI 
issues to be addressed, a library vendor might modify the implementation 
to reflect that.  But it seems that metalibraries like tuples leave less 
and less room for the type of optimizations you see in, say, SGI's node 
allocators for their STL implementation.  And if something like Spirit 
were to be accepted for the TR, how likely is it that any vendor would 
be able to provide a different implementation without breaking the 
library?  I don't know the answers to these questions, but I'm curious.

Dave