Re: [Caml-list] stl?

[Till Varoquaux <till.varoquaux@gmail.com>]

ocaml's integers are never 'boxed'.... but you are right values
contained in blocks don't generally get inlined (there's a known
caveat for float who end up with the dual representation (aka
boxed/unboxed)).

Till

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 5:31 PM, Yoann Padioleau <padator@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> Raoul Duke <raould@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> hi,
>>
>> the caml archives show discussion around C++ polymorphism wrt STL
>> (since Stepanov iirc said that C++ was the only language which
>> supported what he needed to let him implement his generic programming)
>> but i didn't yet see anywhere a concrete implementation or mapping
>> from C++ STL to O'Caml.
>>
>> i'm just trying to get my head around what it might look like, and
>> if/how it might be useful. (it just bugs me that somebody can claim
>> that C++ is the /only/ language that could do it -- maybe the real
>> quote implied "mainstream" or something. apparently Ada wasn't up to
>> snuff http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/drdobbs-interview.html)
>
> I don't know what are the Stepanov requirements, but C++
> can do unboxed collections like  list<int>, which OCaml can
> not provide I think. a 'int list' has boxed integers in OCaml.
>
> Also, a maybe good thing with STL is that you can write a single 'find'
> or 'sort' function that will work for every kind of collections
> (list, arrays, map, hash, etc) by using the
> indirect iterator idiom, without the penalty of dynamic dispatch
> solutions. I am not sure OCaml can do that too.
>
> The question is do we really need those 2 things ?
> I've worked a little bit with C++ using unboxed objects, that
> is without introducing pointers (similar to boxing) in templates,
> like list<figure> instead of list<figure*>, and passing them
> as value in parameters, or returning them,
> and it was far less efficient because there was lots of copy,
> and you could not use then virtual method on them. So in the
> end the C++ programmer I thing manually re-introduce boxing
> when using STL if he wants good performance, and he can not really
> rely either on the default copy/equal implementation provided
> by those templates. So, yes STL makes it possible to do things,
> but programmers don't want them, or only in very few cases where
> one need extreme performance.
>
>
>
>
>>
>> sincerely.
>>
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