libcxx VS STL

If you are comparing hoops that library authors need to jump through in both languages, you can easily make the real-world comparison in the other direction, by comparing Rust's Option with C++'s std::optional (an exercise left for the reader): Rust std: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/library/core/src/option.rs libcxx: https://github.com/llvm-mirror/libcxx/blob/master/include/optional

My favorite prime number generator is the undocumented __next_prime():

https://github.com/llvm-mirror/libcxx/blob/78d6a7767ed57b501...

There is no good reason to use this one except in a code golf environment that includes all headers by default, which is where I learned about it.

I once read a Strousroup quote amounting to "If you understand std::vector, then you understand C++". I thought surely he couldn't have meant the interface but the implentation, googled that llvm's implementation is considered nice and clean, had a look, and noped straight out of there.

C++'s STL linked list for comparison (libcxx).

https://github.com/llvm-mirror/libcxx/blob/master/include/li...

> For example, accessing a std::span or a std::vector outside of its bounds would abort the program, and so would accessing an empty std::optional.

I don't really understand the difference with libc++, libstdc++ and msvc stl's respective debug modes, they already do exactly these checks :

- https://github.com/llvm-mirror/libcxx/blob/78d6a7767ed57b501...

- https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/966010b2eb4a4c52f139b...

I mean it's not hard to read the source for your platform. On Linux/x86_64/libc++ it's roughly:

- https://github.com/llvm-mirror/libcxx/blob/master/include/__...

- https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob_plain;f=nptl/...

I don't particularly care to comb through it to see if anything has changed, but historically it was a a little spin-CAS to make the non-contended path fast and then dropping into a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futex, which is about as good as it gets for staying mostly in userspace but still letting it be scheduler aware so you're not burning up a core busy-polling, which is what often happens when people try to roll their own shit.

Google wants a bit more latitude on the heuristics and degrees of freedom around read/write ownership, so they did it like this: https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/blob/master/absl/synchr... which is quite a bit better commented/legible.

If anyone reading this can do better than the `abseil-cpp` folks, not only would Google take their PR, they'd probably offer them a job.

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