On Thursday, 27 June 2013 at 07:33:16 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
On Wednesday, 26 June 2013 at 22:56:41 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 6/26/2013 2:47 PM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
I have been an adept of iostreams since day one and never
understood why people
complain so much about them or the operator<< and operator>>
for that matter.
Even if you can get past the execrable look of it, it suffers
from at least 3 terrible technical problems:
1. not thread safe
2. not exception safe
3. having to acquire/release mutexes for every << operation
rather than once for the whole expression
Thanks for listing those issues they actually represent areas
where I never used iostreams directly.
1. our iostream usage tends to be done from a central place
2. I am yet to write portable C++ code with exceptions turned on
3. wasn't aware of it
I *used* to like c++'s streams. Very recently, I did a project
with high input output (not in terms of speed, but in terms of
complexity), and it was *horrible!*
Streams have over fprints the ability to statically extract type,
which is a win. However, it doesn't have format strings: What it
has is global state, where it says "now I'm printing in hex",
"now I'm printing with '0' as filler". "My next print will have 6
width"!
Long story short, to print a 2-width '0' padded hex, followed by
a 4 width ' ' padded decimal takes some 120 characters,
completely obliterating what the original string was about.
Trying to re-read the damn thing is near impossible. If you are
serious about your stream manipulation, it also means you should
save the state of your stream before each write, and then restore
it at the end of your write (or in your catch...)
IMO, the concept of manipulators and global state is plain
retarded. It would have been better to have a stormat *object*,
that references the object that needs to be passed, and then the
stream handles the formated object printing. EG:
std::cout << "0x" << std::format(5).w(2).f('0').hex() <<
std::endl;
It is still a bit verbose, but very less so, and much less
intrusive, and it keeps the formats tied to the object, rather
than the stream.
Fun fact, this should actually be pretty easy to implement :D...
