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Subject: Re: [boost] [xint] Boost.XInt formal review (concrete complaint)
From: Chad Nelson (chad.thecomfychair_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-03-09 10:04:00


On Tue, 8 Mar 2011 10:01:13 -0800
"Simonson, Lucanus J" <lucanus.j.simonson_at_[hidden]> wrote:

>> Thanks. I think I see it now, and I'm playing with the concept to see
>> whether it would be a good fit. Early comments from people who've
>> used it suggest that it might not be.
>
> Ok, who were those people and what did they say about expression
> templates?

Eric Niebler: "[...] Joel, I'm honored by your enthusiasm for Proto,
but in this case, I think it's misplaced. For a simple value type like
an infinite precision integer, expression templates are just plain
dangerous."

Peter Dimov: "[...] a large integer library doesn't seem like a trivial
application. Even simple things [...] don't seem entirely
straightforward when the goal is to eliminate all temporaries. So
rewriting everything to use expression templates (properly) could be
quite an amount of work."

Steven Watanabe: "Expression templates are a powerfull tool. However,
I'm not convinced that they're appropriate for this library. Although
they allow some clever optimizations, the extra complexity can cause
confusion. This is a fairly basic library which we can expect to be
used by people who don't know the language well enough to cope with the
problems easily."

> [...] Different people have different priorities, but I have never
> heard of someone who valued compile time over run time. [...]

During the initial development of a program, when I have to compile
every few minutes to test things, I certainly do. But the comments I
was talking about, listed above, weren't focused on that aspect.

-- 
Chad Nelson
Oak Circle Software, Inc.
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