Re: Let's use the STL! [Was: about the abstractData.h]

[Marty Kraimer <mrk@aps.anl.gov>]

Benjamin Franksen wrote:

> Also, as far as I know, the STL has been designed to avoid any kind of
> overhead that is not absolutely necessary for the provided genericity,
> i.e. performance is not an issue.

In the book

The Practice of Programming, Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, Addison Wesley,
1999

Look at the table on Page 81.
Also read the first paragraph on Page 103.

NOTE: The table on page 81 makes C++ STL worse than it is because it uses a map
which has performance O(logn), rather than a hash, which has performance O(1).
But look at the comment about the winNT deque version.

The performance figures the Authors give show that the STL is not mature,
especially for use on multiple platforms.

I do agree that if we have to provide our own classes we should make each class
as similar as possible to a subset of what the STL provides.

Marty Kraimer