draft VS STL

I should have said the "latest standard", not "spec", if we're being technical. But EVERY bit of official material is very clear about asserting that C++23 is still a preview/in-progress, not a standard. Saying otherwise is, strictly speaking, incorrect.

https://isocpp.org/std/the-standard

https://www.iso.org/standard/79358.html

https://github.com/cplusplus/draft/blob/main/papers/n4951.md

[3] https://github.com/cplusplus/draft/releases/tag/n4917

*This is a joke, but only barely so.

pdf

I'm currently going through Annex A of C++20, but I can't find the definition of "designator brace-or-equal-initializer", and couldn't find much formal information on it in an obvious way. The newest source on [decl] (https://github.com/cplusplus/draft/blob/main/source/declarations.tex) also doesn't seem to have it. Am I missing anything, or is this a missing definition in the standard grammar?

> I don't have a copy of the standard at hand, can anyone quote the relevant section?

The C++ (draft) standard is on GitHub! [0] Compiling it needs Perl and some LaTeX packages, but is reasonably straightforwards otherwise. In addition, links to specific draft standards can be found on cppreference [1].

But anyways, in the first C++20 post-publication draft (N4868), the wording you're interested in is in multiple sections. Section 22.2.3 Sequence Containers [sequence.reqmts] has Table 78: Optional sequence container operations [tab:container.seq.opt] (starting on page 815), which states that a precondition of pop_back() is that empty() returns false. Section 16.3.2.4 Detailed Specifications [structure.specifications] (page 481) states:

> Preconditions: the conditions that the function assumes to hold whenever it is called; violation of any preconditions results in undefined behavior.

Therefore, calling pop_back() on an empty vector results in undefined behavior.

> Is this something that in practice is implemented in different (exception-throwing) ways?

Based on a quick glance at the major implementations (libc++ 15.0.7 at [2], MSVC at [3], libstdc++ at [4]), it looks like asserts are used. Whether those result in exceptions probably depends on whether the asserts are compiled in in the first place and how they are implemented, but it's definitely not a guaranteed exception.

[0]: https://github.com/cplusplus/draft

[1]: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/links

[2]: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/llvmorg-15.0.7/lib...

[3]: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/8dfdcc7b7bf66834a7...

[4]: https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=blob;f=libstdc%2B%2B-v3...

Which standard specifically are you quoting there? I checked an old and a new C++ draft in https://github.com/cplusplus/draft/tree/main/papers, and in neither one did 6.3 have anything like that.

https://github.com/cplusplus/draft/releases/download/n4917/n4917.pdf (page 1, chapter 1 scope):

PRs for C++ are at https://github.com/cplusplus/draft But the discussion for a PR is via https://isocpp.org/std/submit-a-proposal

C/C++

By the way, https://github.com/cplusplus/draft/releases/tag/n4910 , says

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