libCat VS expected

That's awesome! I'm working on something that sounds similar. https://github.com/cons-cat/libcat

I'd love to see your work if you're willing to share it here!

This runtime size bothers me a lot. So much that I've been working on a new runtime for C++ that breaks POSIX compatibility to keep binaries as small as they can be. The hello world with LTO is 330ish bytes right now, and I think that can get smaller. https://github.com/Cons-Cat/libCat

I'm working on a library that replaces both C++ and C/POSIX standard libraries (https://github.com/Cons-Cat/libCat), but even then I need to define a few std:: namespace symbols for some features. In the case of std::initializer_list, my answer is just don't use that feature, because you don't really need it.

It's worse in the standard library than it has to be. When I refactored my traits to minimize template instantiations and lean on concepts as much as possible, I measured over 30% improvement to clean build compile times. It's not possible for the standard to do this, because it would subtly change the API. For instance, you can't instantiate or take the address of a concept, but you can for a type-trait class. No reason you'd want to do that, but you can, so they can't "break" the standard library by optimizing this.

This doesn't have to be true. Over the past year I've made progress towards demonstrating how even non-freestanding C++ can be written without any C or C++ standard library headers or DLLs (with large benefits). There are a few names which the compilers require to be in the std:: namespace, though, but they're very special features like source_location and construct_at with semantics that can't be expressed otherwise.

This bit cast has no overhead in debug mode, and is a little bit more generally useful than std::bit_cast(), but cannot be constant evaluated. https://github.com/Cons-Cat/libCat/blob/main/src/libraries/utility/implementations/bit_cast.tpp

It isn't that hard to put a predicate into a type. We have lambdas in an unevaluated context, CTAD, and templated type aliases. https://github.com/Cons-Cat/libCat/blob/main/src/libraries/scaredy/cat/scaredy https://github.com/Cons-Cat/libCat/blob/main/src/global_includes.hpp#L70 https://github.com/Cons-Cat/libCat/blob/main/src/libraries/linux/cat/linux#L289 You do it like this.

But suppose that you have code with no standard library calls at all. Would it still make sense to choose this naming convention? This is actually possible, with a few special exceptions. GCC requires that an implementation of std::source_location has very particular class member names, GCC assigns special semantics to a few function names including std::construct_at and std::move (people seem to know it's inlined, but did you know std::move is required for move-related warnings?), and most intrusively of all, a promise_type must be snake_case. Other names can be worked around by using them into a different namespace with a different letter-case, but promise_type seems unavoidable.

I use C++ for a low-level Linux runtime. Other people are using it for operating systems like SerenityOS and Zircon/Fuschia. People also use C++ for making more compilers like GCC and LLVM.

On this topic Sy Brand is a guarantee, in fact he did the https://github.com/TartanLlama/expected and several presentation of the subject.

In the meantime, I may use the TartanLlama implementation (here) and plan around replacing it with the real deal in the near future.

Sy Brand's tl::expected

expected is my favourite little part of cpp23, I’m using it often in codebase with https://github.com/TartanLlama/expected 😁

outcome and/or expected

Eventually you'll be able to use std::expected in C++23!

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/header/expected

Don't throw exceptions, require the caller to handle errors and propagate them up the stack (everything returns an expected) if they cannot be handled. You are forced to model the error domains instead of just throwing an exception and assuming the caller knows to catch it and do something with it.

Java has checked exceptions, but, Kotlin decided to abandon them.

The nice codebases I have worked on stick to the Result type in Swift or Kotlin. And thus you are forced to 'translate' errors (exceptions?) as described in Alan Griffith's 'Exceptional Java'.

https://accu.org/journals/overload/10/48/griffiths_406/

"If a checked exception is thrown (to indicate an operation failure) by a method in one package it is not to be propagated by a calling method in a second package. Instead the exception is caught and "translated". Translation converts the exception into: an appropriate return status for the method, a checked exception appropriate to the calling package or an unchecked exception recognised by the system. (Translation to another exception type frequently involves "wrapping".)"

If you can't wait for C++23, there's a single header implementation here.

https://github.com/TartanLlama/expected