AECforWebAssembly VS STL

Great! I have not yet made source maps for my programming language that compiles to WebAssembly, and I probably never will.

Up until today, my AEC-to-WebAssembly was, if somebody tried to use two structures of different types as the second and the third operand to the ?: (ternary conditional) operator, as in this example: ``` Structure First Consists Of Nothing; EndStructure

Well, I have written the first compiler for my programming language, targetting x86, in IE6-compatible JavaScript, and the second compiler, targetting WebAssembly, has been written in C++11. I think that, to choose a language to write a compiler in, you need to look at at least two things:

You can see the releases v2.5.3 and v2.5.2 of AECforWebAssembly on GitHub. They are produced with the same version of GCC, the only difference (as far as I know) is that v2.5.2 was produced directly on Debian, whereas v2.5.3 was cross-compiled from Windows to Linux using Docker.

That could be true. I host my AEC-to-WebAssembly compiler on GitHub, GitLab and SourceForge, and it's only on GitHub that it has 21 stars and 2 forks. On GitLab and SourceForge, it has zero of both.

Well, the main compiler for my programming language is targetting the JavaScript Virtual Machine by outputting WebAssembly. I think it's even better than targetting Java Virtual Machine, because, for one thing, your executables can run in any modern browser if you output WebAssembly. If you target Java Virtual Machine, the users need to actually download your app. Furthermore, there is an official assembler for WebAssembly called WebAssembly Binary Toolkit (WABT), so your compiler can output assembly and not have to deal with binary files. There is nothing equivalent to that for Java Virtual Machine.

Again, they are barely functional.

MSVC chokes on many standard-defined constructs: https://github.com/microsoft/STL/issues/1694

clang does not claim to be "mostly usable" at all - most papers are not implemented: https://clang.llvm.org/cxx_status.html#cxx20

And gcc will only start ot be usable with CMake when version 14 is released - that has not happened yet.

And, as I mentioned before, IDE support is either buggy (Visual Studio) or non-existing (any other IDE/OS). So you're off to writing in a text editor and hoping your compiler works to a somewhat usable degree. Yes, at some point people should start using modules, I agree, but to advise library maintainers to ship modularized code... the tooling just isn't there yet.

I mean, the GitHub issue is Microsoft trying to ship their standard library modularized, they employ some of the most capable folks on the planet and pay them big money to get that done, while metaphorically sitting next to the Microsoft compiler devs, and they barely, barely get it done (with bugs, as they themselves mention). This is too much for most other library maintainers.

Notice that there are in practice three distinct implementations of the C++ standard library. They're all awful to read though, here's Microsoft's std::vector https://github.com/microsoft/STL/blob/main/stl/inc/vector

However you're being slightly unfair because Rust's Vec is just defined (opaquely) as a RawVec plus a length value, so let's link RawVec, https://doc.rust-lang.org/src/alloc/raw_vec.rs.html -- RawVec is the part responsible for the messy problem of how to actually implement the growable array type.

Still, the existence of three C++ libraries with slightly different (or sometimes hugely different) quality of implementation means good C++ code can't depend on much beyond what the ISO document promises, and yet it must guard against the nonsense inflicted by all three and by lacks of the larger language. In particular everything must use the reserved prefix so that it's not smashed inadvertently by a macro, and lots of weird C++ idioms that preserve performance by sacrificing clarity of implementation are needed, even where you'd ordinarily sacrifice to get the development throughput win of everybody know what's going on. For example you'll see a lot of "pair" types bought into existence which are there to squirrel away a ZST that in C++ can't exist, using the Empty Base Optimisation. In Rust the language has ZSTs so they can just write what they meant.

Here is Microsoft's implementation of map in the standard library. I think of myself as a competent programmer / computer scientist. I couldn't write this: https://github.com/microsoft/STL/blob/f392449fb72d1a387ac502...

Be careful on Windows, the MSVC STL implementation uses the system time, so it can be badly impacted by clock adjustments: https://github.com/microsoft/STL/issues/718

Can you provide a link? If it affects import std;, I'd like to add it to my tracking issue.

Do you have a list of the bugs you've filed and their current status, like the one I have for the STL? I saw you mentioned 3 bugs 7 months ago, 2 of which were fixed in 17.6 and the third of which was a duplicate of an active bug ("deducing this" is known to not yet work with modules, which is why we don't define the feature-test macro to claim full support).

Yep. And look at our implementation's name: https://github.com/microsoft/STL