Am 02.06.2013 13:08, schrieb John Colvin:
On Sunday, 2 June 2013 at 07:32:10 UTC, Manu wrote:
On 2 June 2013 01:19, Paulo Pinto <pj...@progtools.org> wrote:
Am 01.06.2013 16:24, schrieb Benjamin Thaut:
Am 01.06.2013 01:30, schrieb Manu:
On 1 June 2013 09:15, bearophile <bearophileh...@lycos.com
<mailto:bearophileHUGS@lycos.**com <bearophileh...@lycos.com>>> wrote:
Manu:
On 1 June 2013 01:12, bearophile <bearophileh...@lycos.com
<mailto:bearophileHUGS@lycos.**com
<bearophileh...@lycos.com>>>
wrote:
Manu:
Frankly, this is a textbook example of why STL is the
spawn of satan. For
some reason people are TAUGHT that it's reasonable to
write code like
this.
There are many kinds of D code, not everything is a high
performance
ray-tracer or 3D game. So I'm sure there are many many
situations where
using the C++ STL is more than enough. As most tools, you
need to know
where and when to use them. So it's not a Satan-spawn :-)
So why are we having this conversation at all then if faster
isn't better in this instance?
Faster is better in this instance.
What's wrong is your thinking that the STL as the spawn of
Satan in
general.
Ah, but that's because it is ;)
Rule of thumb: never use STL in tight loops. problem solved (well,
mostly)...
I have to agree here. Whenever you have a codebase that has to work
on 9
platforms and 6 compilers the S in STL vanishes. Also the
implementations are so varying in quality that you might get really
good
performance on one platform but really bad on another. It seems like
everyone in the games industry avoids STL like the plague.
Kind Regards
Benjamin Thaut
I used to have that experience even with C, when I started using it
around
1994. C++ was even worse between CFront, ARM and ongoing standardization
work.
As for STL, I can assure that HPC guys are huge fans of STL and Boost.
The funny thing about HPC guys though, at least in my experience (a bunch
of researchers from Cambridge who I often give _basic_ optimisation
tips),
is they don't write/run 'high performance software', they're actually
pretty terrible programmers and have a tendency to write really low
performing software, but run it on super high performance computers, and
then call the experience high performance computing...
It bends my mind to see them demand an order of magnitude more computing
power to run an algorithm that's hamstrung by poor choices of
containers or
algorithms that probably cost them an order of magnitude in
performance ;)
And then the Universities take their demands seriously and deliver them
more hardware! O_O
At least when I did my traineeship at CERN (2003-2004) that was the case.
I hope CERN has better software engineers than Cambridge University ;)
Most of these guys are mathematicians and physicists first, and
programmers
second.
In my experience, physicists are terrible programmers. I should know, I
am one! As soon as you step outside the realm of simple, < 10kloc, pure
procedural code, the supposed "HPC"
guys don't generally have the first clue how to write something fast.
CERN is responsible for the abomination that is ROOT, but to be fair to
them there is a lot of good code from there too.
There was an office there that had the sentence "You can program Fortran
in any language" on the door. :)
--
Paulo
