On 3/29/06, Beman Dawes <bdawes@acm.org> wrote:
Isn't aligned when you have unaligned just an optimization?
Yep. I personally haven't had a need for aligned, but Darin Adler did, and I respect his judgement.
and non-POD flavors were requested.
How does POD apply to this?
In theory, only POD types have strong enough layout guarantees to be portable across I/O operations. In practice, a type that is otherwise POD but has constructors and a destructor is in fact portable, but some people are scared to use such types because some compiler down the road might add some extra cruft.
What's a better situation, no libary or a non-perfect library?
I do too, but it takes time and I guess no one had that.
I just took a look at the internals of my own roll-you-own classes, and I'd be embarrassed to post them since they are really just retreaded C code. C style casts and that sort of thing. Originally written in 1985! They are also just holders, without arithmetic operations. A Boost-quality set would provide full arithmetic functionality.
What kind of arithmetic operations would you need?
Open source software is very user driven. If no users care enough to do it themselves, or fund someone else to do it, it doesn't happen until a developer comes along willing to spend the time/effort.
But it doesn't have to be a single individual. I think with some coordination it can be done a lot faster by a group.