EA Standard Template Library VS wil

> you can still use it with smart pointers provided by any other library

Is the point of having a kitchen-sink library like this not that you dont have to reach for a 3rdparty library for things that you need 'all the time'?

Certainly, not everyone needs it.

...but, not everyone needs threads either. Not everyone needs an http server; and yet, if you have an application framework that provides them, when you do need them, it saves you reaching for yet-another-dependency.

Was that no the point from the beginning?

unique_ptr is a fundamental primitive for many, as you see from some other frameworks (1), and implementation is not always either a) trivial, or b) as simple as 'just use std::unique_ptr'.

This does seem like a very opinionated decision with reasonably unclear justification.

[1] - eg. https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/blob/release/Engin..., https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL/blob/master/include/...

Can I introduce you to EASTL

For games focused stuff have a look at EASTL https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL also perhaps some of the Data Oriented Design stuff (see Mike Acton's CPP Con Talks). This also have loads of good stuff https://www.dataorienteddesign.com/dodbook/

C++, but generally treat it as C. STL is pretty slow while debugging so we avoid it and write our own replacements. If you don't want to drive that deep use something like EASTL: https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL

In my experience game devs don't eschew the STL because of compile times, but because (a) its memory management is not sufficiently tunable and (b) it uses exceptions heavily which many game engines disable entirely due to perceived performance problems. For this reason, some of the engines I've worked on have used their own forks of the STL in the spirit of EASTL to rectify these issues. Others like my current project just don't use the STL at all (outside of some third-party library code) and use custom libraries for everything.

In my opinion, you should also benchmark it against something like boost::container::flat_set or eastl::vector_set and you should expect the same performance as with your ordered functionality. Another interesting idea for organization of such flat and sorted container can be found here.

finally, if you're worried about performance (a lot of aspiring game programmers seem to be, even though for anything but high-end engines the STL is likely fine if you know what you're doing..) you could look into the EA STL or other STL replacements..

check it out: https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL

I just took a look at their atomic.h and wow, "well-documented" is an understatement !

Even then, MFC and C++/CX were the only productive ways to use it from Microsoft SDKs.

.NET isn't as convenient as VB 6 was, fully embracing COM as the VBX replacement model, technically introduced in VB5, but still some stuff was lacking.

Then there is Delphi and C++ Builder.

It beat me that having doubled down on COM since how Longhorn went down, and Windows team getting their way doing avoiding .NET to take over, they hardly managed to create nice tooling as the competition.

Editing IDL files with a Notepad like experience, manually merging generated code, and a couple of frameworks that barely go beyond yet another way to do AddRef/Release/QueryInterface and aggregation.

Meanwhile D-BUS, XPC and AIDL, provide much better dev experience.

Pity that Borland products are kind of tainted due to mismanagement decisions, otherwise maybe fixing COM dev experience would already been seriously taken by VS team.

Ah, nowadays WIL is probably the best approach when having only to consume COM.

https://github.com/microsoft/wil

Have a look at WIL for a C++ library used by Microsoft themselves, including kernel development.

I'm digging for more information and it looks like Microsoft's created a way to handle the problems I'm trying to address with this: https://github.com/Microsoft/wil/wiki/RAII-resource-wrappers

Since we are on this subject, those that need a nice C++ library to deal with COM in VC++, are better served with WIL.

Not since Vista.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/kernel-...

> Creates a binary that can be executed in the Windows kernel. The code in the current project gets compiled and linked by using a simplified set of C++ language features that are specific to code that runs in kernel mode.

And then there is WIL, https://github.com/microsoft/wil

https://community.osr.com/discussion/291326/the-new-wil-libr...

> First off, let me point out that this library is used to implement large parts of the OS. There are hundreds of developers here who use it. So unlike, uh, some other things that get tossed onto github, this project is not likely to wither and die tomorrow.

> There are, however, only a handful of kernel developers working on the library, so the kernel support has been coming along much slower. I'd like to expand the existing kernel features in depth ....

> Plus C++ standard library can't be used anyway and auto pointers aren't really that much of a concern at the kernel level

https://github.com/microsoft/wil

"Ah, but that isn't used on the Windows kernel" would be the expected reply, well

https://community.osr.com/discussion/291326/the-new-wil-libr...

"Microsoft's toolchain does not ship a copy of the STL that works in kernel mode. Partly this is because the kernel's CRT doesn't support C++ exceptions. (And partly this is because I/O is wildly different in kernel, so you'd have to rewrite the implementation of all the I/O libraries.)

But for kernel developers, wil ships a subset of an STL implementation. To avoid conflicting with the real STL, it's available under the wistd namespace. The rule of thumb is that wistd::foo is a drop-in replacement for std::foo."

Windows is a mix of legacy C code, which started to be migrated into C++ around the Vista time (hence /kernel in VC++) and .NET/COM (WinRT is basically COM with some extras).

Modern kernel code makes use of WIL.

https://github.com/microsoft/wil