On Tue, 8 Mar 2011 10:01:13 -0800 "Simonson, Lucanus J" <lucanus.j.simonson@intel.com> wrote:
Thanks. I think I see it now, and I'm playing with the concept to see whether it would be a good fit. Early comments from people who've used it suggest that it might not be.
Ok, who were those people and what did they say about expression templates?
Eric Niebler: "[...] Joel, I'm honored by your enthusiasm for Proto, but in this case, I think it's misplaced. For a simple value type like an infinite precision integer, expression templates are just plain dangerous." Peter Dimov: "[...] a large integer library doesn't seem like a trivial application. Even simple things [...] don't seem entirely straightforward when the goal is to eliminate all temporaries. So rewriting everything to use expression templates (properly) could be quite an amount of work." Steven Watanabe: "Expression templates are a powerfull tool. However, I'm not convinced that they're appropriate for this library. Although they allow some clever optimizations, the extra complexity can cause confusion. This is a fairly basic library which we can expect to be used by people who don't know the language well enough to cope with the problems easily."
[...] Different people have different priorities, but I have never heard of someone who valued compile time over run time. [...]
During the initial development of a program, when I have to compile every few minutes to test things, I certainly do. But the comments I was talking about, listed above, weren't focused on that aspect. -- Chad Nelson Oak Circle Software, Inc. * * *