Re: [boost] Boost gripes on slashdot

From: David Bergman (David.Bergman_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-07-15 15:42:11

Well, instead of confronting these "experts" on the their actual  
knowledge of C++ vs "C with some nifty syntactic sugar," we should  
point out that VC 6.0 does not deal with (ISO) C++ and - more  
importantly - that C++ enables beauty of *use* of a library via  
complexity (viewed as "ugliness" by the untrained eye) of its  
*implementation*. I.e., one trades some hackery against beauty and non- 
redundancy of use.

In fact, it would be enlightening to take this matter down to concrete  
code and show how a game engine task could be more succinctly  
expressed using the full power of C++ and Boost. I am willing to  
provide such a solution to any reasonably small sample code they  
present.

Worrying about compilation time being two minutes greater makes an old  
geek like me smile. How about not programming according to the "apply  
random changes, recompile, suffer through errors and repeat" principle  
and instead actually thinking before hitting that compile button in  
that cute IDE.

The only valid point that was presented was that of hairy error  
messages. Here the concept checkers of Boost can help, though.

/David

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 15, 2007, at 3:20 AM, "Steve Trutane" <trutane_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> On this recent slashdot thread, there seems to be more griping than
> advocacy regarding Boost and template metaprogramming:
>
> Any "Pretty" Code Out There?
> http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=250311&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=19862839
>
> Just wondering if the Boost devs have any words of wisdom on this  
> matter.
>
> Steve
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