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Should I be using STL?

gimp · 2000-06-26T13:00:40

Ok, after spending a fair amount of time recoding part of my game recently I decided to submit it to a public MS VC++ newsgroup and see if any of the programmers there were interested in stepping through my code and letting me know what their thoughts are.... The overwealming reaction was... use stl. -I''m mallocing everything myself, mostly strings. I was recommended basic_string -I use some basic C code for reading file in to a memory map. I was recommended iostream -I have a bunch of linked lists and queue. I was recommended map and queue and vector? etc the list goes on... So, from a game programmers perspective, should I be doing this? I''m willing to accept a minor speed reduction so that I dont have to spend so much time debugging. I also need my code to be threadsafe, which isn''t difficult though all i know how to use is mutex''s. So, in the opinions of game programmers should I rewrite this code again to teach myself STL. (The STL code wouldn''t be used in any graphics programming, just core game code, message handling, loaders, networking etc) thanks gimp

General and Gameplay Programming Programming

Started by gimp June 25, 2000 06:54 AM

12 comments, last by gimp 23 years, 10 months ago

deadlinegrunt

123

June 25, 2000 08:57 PM

                #include <iostream>#include <fstream>int main( int argc, char **argv ){	if( argc < 2 )	{		std::cout << "specify filename.  i.e.  fileTest.exe somefile" << std::endl;		return 1;	}	std::ifstream	inFile( *(++argv), std::ios::in / std::ios::out ); // The / is suppose to be an 'or' operator	std:: cout << inFile.rdbuf();	return 0;}

Hopefully that's a start.

YAP YFIO,
deadlinegrunt

Edited by - deadlinegrunt on June 25, 2000 10:00:10 PM

Edited by - deadlinegrunt on June 25, 2000 10:00:31 PM

Edited by - deadlinegrunt on June 25, 2000 10:01:22 PM

~deadlinegrunt

gimp

142

Author

June 25, 2000 09:05 PM

Thanks it IS a start. The code needed to make STL ''do stuff'' seems a lot different to the way I code classes, perhaps thats a lesson in itself, but for now I''m just trying to make sence of it all...

In the interim I''ve been playing with map::. It looks like a nice place to hold my keyboard bindings... this might not seem so bad after all...

Thanks again...

Chris Brodie

Stoffel

250

June 26, 2000 12:44 PM

IMPORTANT NOTE:

The original poster seemed to insinuate that STL was suggested as a way to make things thread-safe.

STL is not thread-safe.

If you want to make it thread-safe, you must handle synchronization externally.

On another note, it seems that about 10-20% of the questions on this board are starting to be about STL. Maybe there should be a separate discussion group for it?

Erik Post

122

June 26, 2000 01:00 PM

Stoffel, small comment on your post about thread-safety: first of all, technically, STL says nothing about thread-safety. An implementation does. The STL implementation from SGI (on the page that deadlinegrunt mentions, is thread safe. For a discussion, see http://www.sgi.com/Technology/STL/thread_safety.html. SGI's implementation is exception-safe as well.

Another popular (free) STL implementation is STLport (see http://www.stlport.org). Since it's based on SGI's code, it's thread safe as well. It includes the new SGI IOstreams library as well.

Other implementations (like the one that comes with VC++ 6) might not be thread safe. The best way to find out is to check the documentation that comes with it.

Erik

Edited by - Erik Post on June 26, 2000 3:23:19 PM

Should I be using STL?

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