At Wed, 13 Oct 2010 09:01:46 +0100, Robert Jones wrote:
On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 3:10 AM, David Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> wrote:
At Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:40:38 -0500, Andrew Sutton wrote:
I find it interesting, but also a bit sad, that the thread on metaprogramming “plumbing” is very active, while this fundamental question of abstraction and generic programming has gone unaddressed.
... Says the guy who, quite literally, wrote the book on metaprogramming
:)
Sorry.
The irony is not lost on me. But I fear I've created a monster :(
For the mere mortals among us, who are struggling to keep up with the metaprogramming astronauts, am I right in thinking that you are lamenting the emphasis on 'bells and whistles' to support SIMD iterators, while the more fundamental aspects of iterator segmentation are being ignored?
You're in the ballpark. I'm lamenting the focus on tricky techniques (a catch-all bucket for metaprogramming and JIT and...) when there's a more fundamental question of abstraction to deal with. IMO, first you should get the abstractions right, and only then should you go back and apply tricky techniques to optimize if/where necessary.
And in your last remark are you saying you fear that metaprogramming and the Boost MPL are monsters!?
No, but I do fear that the Boost community has become so adept at fancy TMP that we have lost track of our roots in generic programming, per this thread: http://news.gmane.org/find-root.php?message_id=%3cm2wrq5zpxq.wl%25dave%40boo... -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com