Where do you go to find your C++ articles and/or news these days? => How D influences modern C++ libraries

[Georg Wrede]

Matthew Wilson wrote:
> "Georg Wrede" <georg at nospam.org> wrote
>> Matthew Wilson wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi
>>> 
>>> It's been a while since my consulting practice stole all the time
>>>  I wanted to spend researching and writing, and things in the 
>>> publishing world seem to have changed considerably in that time. 
>>> CUJ is gone, and other magazines seem to have lost their pizzaz 
>>> (and some, perhaps, quality along with it). Other than the ACCU, 
>>> I'm not aware of anything C/C++-related maintaining any 
>>> significant momentum. Of course, I could be quite wrong, which is
>>> why I'm putting out the question.
>> 
>> Well! The second guy this week, who walks in from ages of absence.
>>  Welcome back, Matthew!
> 
> Thanks, but I'm not back yet. A return-to-D is still at least 5-6 
> months away. But I will be back for sure -> see below

Looking forward to it!

>> When I last remember having seen you here, D was unknown to most 
>> folks. Today things are different.
>> 
>> Why not quickly publish what you already have, and then start 
>> writing about D? Why beat a terminally ill horse, when you should 
>> use a car. (The horse bit is actually your own first paragraph, 
>> above!)
> 
> Well, there're several answers. One is that commercially I earn my 
> bread-and-butter from teaching C++, C# and Java development teams how
> to do their thing better, or building products for clients (in C++, 
> C# or Java). As yet there are no D things happening in any commercial
> space that I come near.

When I was a kid and read SciAm, I saw all these ads about commercial 
versions of Lint. Made me sick to see that a language is so un-ergonomic 
that you have to buy expensive tools like that.

When my grandfather worked at Nokia, all they made was rubber boots and 
winter tyres. Later, when my college schoolmate's father was the CEO, 
they diversified into electronics. They even made a CP/M computer, 
called MikroMikko. But it was his idea to start making your own future, 
and that's when they got into mobile phones. We're doing that with D.

> Another side of things is that I've been working on C++ libraries 
> that, in part, borrow some ideas from D (and other languages). You 
> may or may not have heard of Pantheios, my C++ logging API library. 
> It's 100% type-safe, extensible, generic and *extremely* efficient - 
> up to two orders of magnitude faster than all the other C++ logging 
> libraries. Part of the reason for this is that it is able to convert 
> logging statement components to string slices (len+ptr) - i.e. like a
>  D string - which are then treated generically by the core functions 
> that congregate them into a logging entry. And it only does any of 
> this _after_ it's determined whether a given statement is to be 
> logged or not, so it's effectively zero-cost when that logging level 
> is switched off.

Now that's something that ought to be in D's CV!

> In one fell-swoop, Pantheios can eliminate #ifdef DEBUG from 
> application code forever, thanks in part to its D influences. ;-)
> 
> As soon as I get Pantheios out of beta (it's at beta 119, even though
>  it's in production systems around the globe) I plan to write 
> Pantheios.D, and am open-armed to any willing D-collaborators.
> 
> The other major library that I'm working on is FastFormat, which is 
> be a generic, extensible, 100% type-safe, *highly* efficient, 
> I18N/L15N-enabling formatting library that I expect (or at least 
> hope) will kill stone dead C's streams, C++'s IOStreams and any other
>  C++ output/formatting libraries currently in use. It uses similar 
> technology to Pantheios, and is influenced by D's writef() to some 
> degree. I hope to release this in the next few weeks, and again 
> spreaD some Design into the C++ worlD. ;-)

Sounds really cool! Good to see you've covered the day job part.

>> Switch to D, and see Scott Meyers &co sink in the C of obsolesence,
>>  while your street credibility does the Red Bull.
> 
> Well, not sure I think of it quite like that, but I'm definitely 
> still interested in D and plan to get back into it when I am able.

And it ain't gettin' any less interesting.