[boost] boost.range bug in transformed or sliced

Subject: [boost] boost.range bug in transformed or sliced
From: John Reid (j.reid_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-06-06 04:22:57

Suppose you wish to transform and slice a random access range.
Surprisingly the order in which you apply the operations makes a big
difference to performance. I'm guessing this is not desired behaviour,
correct me if I'm wrong. AFAICT when transforming happens before slicing
the iterators involved in the internals of boost.range are being treated
as forward iterators not random access iterators. An advance() operation
is made on one of the iterators with a negative number and this advance
is O(n) for forward iterators but O(1) for random access. The code below
demonstrates (adapted from sliced example code).

On an unrelated note the documentation for transformed does not mention
that the function is part of the range return type. It is given as:
boost::transformed_range<typeof(rng)>

Code to demonstrate the transform then slice problem:

#include <boost/range/adaptor/transformed.hpp>
#include <boost/range/adaptor/sliced.hpp>
#include <boost/range/algorithm/copy.hpp>
#include <boost/assign.hpp>
#include <iterator>
#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
#include <functional>

struct identity {
        typedef int result_type;
        result_type operator()( int i ) const { return i; }
};

int main(int argc, const char* argv[])
{
    using namespace boost::adaptors;
    using namespace boost::assign;

    std::vector< int > input;
    input += 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9;

        // slicing then transforming my iterator range
    std::cout << "Sliced then transformed: ";
        boost::copy(
                input | sliced( 2, 8 ) | transformed( identity() ),
                std::ostream_iterator< int >( std::cout, ",") );
        std::cout << "\n";

        // transforming then slicing my iterator range - takes a very long time....
    std::cout << "Transformed then sliced: ";
        boost::copy(
                input | transformed( identity() ) | sliced( 2, 8 ),
                std::ostream_iterator< int >(std::cout, ","));
        std::cout << "\n";

    return 0;
}