On 06/09/09 11:46, Christian Schladetsch wrote:
This exactly corelates to my 1,2,3 steps of Spirite usage. But somehow I am the Demon? [snip]
I think you have some good points, Christian, that you made here: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/190361 The slow compile times, IIRC, have been mentioned frequently. The cryptic error messages have also been mentioned before, but they are not spirit specific. They are a problem with template metaprogramming and expression templates debugging in general, as acknowledged near the beginning of Chap. 8 of: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321227255/billvennersA/ So, the problem, as you noted earlier, but slightly modified, is the C++ *compiler* is not a *fast* language *development* tool. However, the one advantage of spirit (that I can think of at the moment) is that the parser produced *parses faster* than one produced with antlr or yacc because of the compile-time optimization possible with expression templates. OK, I'm just guessing here, and I have no benchmarks to show that. Maybe the spirit folks do? Now I can see your justification for abandoning spirit because the slow compile times and cryptic error messages slow down the developer. On the other hand, the faster parse times saves the end-user time. So it's a balance between whether one thinks the parse time, which is experienced *many* times by the end user, is more important than the developer time, which is experienced probably *fewer* times than the parse times. Is that about right? Anyway, although I think you may have some good points, I also think you could get more useful responses with more diplomacy. -Sincerely, Larry