sml VS abseil-cpp

Anyway the need is not complicated, I need both entry and exit functions from every state, optionally allowing these functions to be coroutines (that's special sauce but for later), and an explicit state transition table which also have a way to say that a state can be accessed at any point. Also allow states to be state machines, optional FSM hierarchies. If you ignore the coroutine stuff it's pretty standard features these days, except that - Boost.MSM is quite archaic now (it was so novel when it was first released...) although it allows most of the features I talked about, I just think it will complicate my code unneecessarilly; - Boost-Ext.SML (not Boost) is almost perfect except it doesnt have entry/exit functions on states for some reason. Also last time we (as in in livestream) tried it in prototypes it didnt compile on msvc XD - Boost-Ext.SML2 is even better but still doesnt have entry/exit functions although it's in the plans.

Hello all. Being a huge fan of state machine and coroutines, I have been browsing around for examples of what other people do combine these two. I have been using boost-ext/sml for quite many projects and are quite happy about that. But when transitioning to code that relies on coroutines, I would like to write entry/exit/actions/guard methods that uses coroutines and where I can co_await on awaitables from Asio and more recently "Boost Async".

boost-ext/sml: quite modern way of doing state machines using a DSL

I recently was troubleshooting a crash that backtraced through the boost::sml library [0]. The crash didn't actually have anything to do with the library, but it was used as the core event loop.

The backtrace -- as in, just the output from running `bt` in GDB -- was over a thousand wrapped lines long. There were ~5 stack frames that took up 200 lines of console each to print just the function name. That product's debug builds recently hit the 2GB line, which is enough that old versions of binutils complain.

I don't know what the solution is. There's some really neat stuff you can do with template metaprogramming, and in stripped release builds it compiles down extremely tiny. Plus the code is very clean to read. But it does feel like there isn't any kind of central vision for the C++ debugging experience, and bad interactions between highly-complex modern C++ typing, the compiler, and the debugger are probably only going to get worse unless somebody (the ISO committee? Vendors?) thinks really hard about debugging support.

[0]: https://github.com/boost-ext/sml

I'm a big fan of MSM but what you're experiencing is pretty normal for template-heavy libraries built on C++03 machinery (emulation of variadic templates is the usual culprit). It's probably not the answer you're hoping for, but the real solution is to switch to a library with more modern foundations. (I've been happily using [Boost::ext].SML for a few years but I'm reluctant to strongly recommend anything in particular since I haven't re-explored the problem space since I found it.)

The Boost one that you mention, seems to be one that it's kinda old. A "successor" of sorts is Boost SML. I've not used it yet, but certainly the first impressions are very good.

Or Boost.Sml

At our company, we rely a lot on https://github.com/boost-ext/sml

I'm a big fan of boost::sml for representing state machines.

https://github.com/boost-ext/sml (State Machine DSL and backend for perfomance)

Yeah, it's nice! And Abseil does it, IFF you use LLVM libc++.

https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/blob/master/absl/string...

The standard adopted it as resize_and_overwrite. Which I think is a little clunky.

This may be confusing to those familiar with Google's libraries. The baseline is the Go BTree, which I personally never heard of until just now, not the C++ absl::btree_set. The benchmarks aren't directly comparable, but the C++ version also comes with good microbenchmark coverage.

https://github.com/google/btree

https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/blob/master/absl/contai...

An implementation of call_once that accommodates callbacks that throw: https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/blob/master/absl/base/c...

I wouldn't say it's that cryptic. It's just a few bitwise rotations/shifts/xor operations.

You can see hashing optimizations as well https://www.deepmind.com/blog/alphadev-discovers-faster-sort..., https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/commit/74eee2aff683cc7d...

I was one of the members who reviewed expertly what has been done both in sorting and hashing. Overall it's more about assembly, finding missed compiler optimizations and balancing between correctness and distribution (in hashing in particular).

It was not revolutionary in a sense it hasn't found completely new approaches but converged to something incomprehensible for humans but relatively good for performance which proves the point that optimal programs are very inhuman.

Note that for instructions in sorting, removing them does not always lead to better performance, for example, instructions can run in parallel and the effect can be less profound. Benchmarks can lie and compiler could do something differently when recompiling the sort3 function which was changed. There was some evidence that the effect can come from the other side.

For hashing it was even funnier, very small strings up to 64 bit already used 3 instructions like add some constant -> multiply 64x64 -> xor upper/lower. For bigger ones the question becomes more complicated, that's why 9-16 was a better spot and it simplified from 2 multiplications to just one and a rotation. Distribution on real workloads was good, it almost passed smhasher and we decided it was good enough to try out in prod. We did not rollback as you can see from abseil :)

But even given all that, it was fascinating to watch how this system was searching and was able to find particular programs can be further simplified. Kudos to everyone involved, it's a great incremental change that can bring more results in the future.

Check out https://abseil.io. It offers absl::optional, which is a backport of std::optional.