C++Now! 2012 slides

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, June 08, 2012 00:30:06 Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
> On 07.06.2012 22:34, Peter Alexander wrote:
> > Don't get me started on std.algorithm.find...
> 
> Why not ? It's perfect example of goodness of generic programing,
> flexibility (for free) + speciality (when you need) for the win.
> If you language lacks such construct you end up inveting ways around it:
> - make findInt, findString, quickFindString, findPerson etc. * number of
> containters
> - shoehorn everything into a simpler design: qsort, boxing-unboxing etc.

std.algorithm does a lot of really cool stuff in a very generic way, and on the 
whole, it works very well. It's true that its functions tend to be more 
complicated than most, but they're generally not complicated to use, and if 
you're going to have that kind of complication, it's best to have it in the 
standard library written by experts in the language rather than trying to 
write it yourself. And D manages to make such functions _very_ sane in 
comparison to what C++ would need to do to get the same result. If anything, 
the problem here is simply that not all of these functions are tested as well 
as they should be (as the bug with min shows).

Personally, my favorite function in std.algorithm is startsWith (or endsWith). 
It just about blew my mind when I realized what it was doing. It is 
fantastically cool how it uses recursive templates to get its job done, and it 
makes for an incredibly powerful and easy to use function.

- Jonathan M Davis