STL VS EA Standard Template Library

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

> 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 !