[PD] C++ for reusable dsp lib - or better use C?

[Mathieu Bouchard]

Le 2012-02-22 à 09:37:00, Hans-Christoph Steiner a écrit :

> STL, Qt, and Boost are all only used in C++.

Qt is also available for Ada, C#, D, Haskell, Harbour, Java, Lisp, Lua, 
Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, QML, R, Ruby, Scheme, ... and even Tcl.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_%28framework%29#Bindings

now for the others...

STL and Boost are different. While Qt's interface (API) consists of 
features that are in many languages (or have very close equivalents), STL 
uses several features that are quite C++-specific and at odds with how 
other programming languages work. Other languages have already their own 
library covering the same ground as the STL, though usually in a quite 
different way and usually not that efficiently. Boost goes further in the 
direction of using all the C++ features that exist and it's at least as 
impossible to port.

This shows a rift between libraries with least-common-denominator 
interfaces that are somewhet easy to port to many languages (incl Qt), and 
libraries that are deeply entrenched in a language to get the best of it. 
The latter is more common in C++, because least-common-denominator tend to 
be a same small set of data types (int,float,string,array), basic OOP 
features, and that's all, while C++ has long expanded beyond « C with 
Classes » to include templates and stuff.

Templates can't be easily wrapped because their point is to generate code 
on-the-fly as the programmer is programming. Wrapping that kind of library 
means reducing the flexibility and/or efficiency, by precompiling some 
use-cases of templates, and forbidding the rest. Otherwise, you'd need 
something that can recompile C++ templates on-the-fly in another language, 
and I haven't seen that yet.

Actually, one can do similar tricks in plain C with macros, but those same 
caveats appear as with templates.

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| Mathieu BOUCHARD ----- téléphone : +1.514.383.3801 ----- Montréal, QC