boost – Blog of Anders Rune Jensen

In the quest for improving the quality of the MMS code in 1.1.0 I’ve done several things, one of which was to convert all the source to the boost foreach statement. Since I liked the result of the foreach cleanup so much, I decided to see what other libraries could be of use. I quickly found the function and bind library which allowed me to remove the internal function pointers framework we have currently been using. While converted I was surprised to see how cleaner the code became. The bind function is truly easy to use and read and made it possible to remove several helper classes which only purpose was to capture state to create a uniform interface.

So instead of:

class FP
{
  std::list numbers;

  FP(std::list n)
    : numbers(n)
  {}

  call(int t)
  {
    int total;
    foreach (int i, numbers)
      total += i*t;
    return total;
  }
};

(I saved the part of actually creating the function pointer object). One gets:

call(int t, std::list numbers)
{
  int total;
  foreach (int i, numbers)
    total += i*t;
  return total;
}

boost::bind(&call, _1, list_of_numbers);

Voila. Now if only the wordpress code formatting didn’t suck so much 😉

Recently I’ve been looking a lot into boost and it’s really a great set of libraries. Although the syntax of some of the libraries could use a helping hand (assign library). Luckily I was watching a presentation by Bjarne Stroustrup on the next C++ standard and it appears that they will finally add a way to construct containers such as vectors with elements as construction time. I think it was called initializer lists and the syntax was the following:

      vector v {1,2,3}

So you can now initialize them just like regular arrays 🙂 Furthermore it appears that we’ll get threads and perhaps a common filesystem + network abstraction. Now if only they could be a little quicker at bringing forward these new standards 😉