I came across two interviews (here and here) of Alexander Stepanov, the father of STL. There are quite a lot of interesting bits. For example, he thinks C++ is the best programming language to realize his goal, but he is also strongly against OOP at the same time. In addition, he has paid a lot of efforts on efficiency, which we can see from STL. He said: “It is silly to abstract an algorithm in such a way that when you instantiate it back it becomes inefficient”. I like these two interviews because I think in the same way. The only exception is I do not use STL, although I think it is the best generic library and I like it a lot. But why?
Two reasons. Firstly, STL is written in C++, which makes it unavailable to all C projects. It is possible to only use STL and forget all the other features in C++, but people rarely do so. At least I have not seen such a project where STL is combined with procedural programming. In addition, C++ projects are usually less portable than C projects and STL makes it worse. It puts a lot of stress on C++ compilers. Even Stepanov agreeed, by the time of the interview, that “The unfortunate reality is that a lot of code in the present implementation of STL is suboptimal because of the compiler limitations and bugs of the compilers I had to use when I was developing STL”. Secondly, using STL also means much longer compiling time. I remembered I used to compile a customized Linux kernel for my old laptop in an hour. Probably I would spend more than a day to compile if it was written using C++/STL.
A generic container library would benefit a lot of C programmers, but so far I am not aware of any efficient implementation. Glib tries to achieve so, but it uses void* and this inevitably will incur overhead and complicate interfaces. And finally, I decide to write my own one. Ideally (but probably impractically) I want to achieve four goals: a) efficiency in speed and space; b) elegance in interface; c) independency between functinality and d) simplicity in codes. However, currently I am not competent enough to achieve all these goals and I am not a professional programmer at all (and so cannot invest enough time). As I said in my About page, I mainly do this to please myself.
Ah, so you want templates in C. It can be done with horrifying preprocessor magic. That’s how they came to C++.