[harry8]

"We started by looking at a paper from Paul Pedriana on N2771 “EASTL -- Electronic Arts Standard Template Library”. While this paper was submitted in 2007, neither chairs of LWG recall reviewing this paper and no record of its review exists."

I give you the C++ standardization committee. Someone submits a paper to them with their issues and, moreover with solutions fully implemented in a library and also details the whys and wherefores. I have nothing to say whether this was good, bad or middling work just that the C++ standardization committee "has no record" of actually having read and considered it 8 years later and the chairs don't recall doing so. But I'm sure they all ran around as "anointed smart people" claiming all the others on the committee are anointed smart people instead. Sorry if I'm sounding a bit bitter but they really need to be called out, this is really gross. It's contemptuous of people making the effort to make the language better is the best you can say of it. Arrogant, stupid, unkind, vicious and bitter might describe me and I am sorry for it if you feel that way (please note it and I will try to do better), but I think it's also a fair description of this act by the committee.

Also on the front page today was Bruce Eckel's "thoughts on scala" which were utterly ridiculous for the first 10 minutes I watched. -He's a C++ stanardization committee alumni.

"We feel that a holistic "here's a new STL and our problems" approach to any change seems a bit doomed. "

WTF? You can't learn anything about what changes are desirable in the language from the implementation of how they solved their problems and assess whether they are more generally applicable? Pieces of them aren't worth assessing to be just adopted (or rejected)? You can't criticise what they tried and note the implementation and why the STL can do better?

Seriously if you can't learn anything from this on the committee what the hell are you doing? Well NOW they are looking at it, hurrah! While justifying why it wasn't done before, boo!

Mea culpa and a rocket up the committee members of the time seems vastly more appropriate if you actually care about this language. (Obviously if you don't, resign from the committee, immediately, anything else is immoral) If the members didn't care then, highlight the fact and state it is unacceptable going forward.

If it's common or garden (hopefully isolated) incompetence like all of us display at times. "We're very sorry this happened." Would seem to be about the minimum standard here. It's the arrogance that goes along with the committee when they act like this that really gets me.

[acqq]

I also remember Bloomberg submitted in 2005 some very nice template library changes that avoid some very real pain points of STL:

www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2005/n1850.pdf

"Using an existing implementation of the C++ standard library as a base, we made backward-compatible modifications to enable such per-instance allocators."

I still don't know how I'd achieve per-instance allocator in modern "part-of-standard C++ STL." Is it possible? If yes, how? Does anybody know?

[humanrebar]

> I still don't know how I'd achieve per-instance allocator in modern "part-of-standard C++ STL." Is it possible? If yes, how? Does anybody know?

Well, there are two things you can do.

1. (Accepted in C++11) Allow stateful allocators. This is especially useful for things like pool allocators. Your container would keep a pointer to its allocator and perform allocator operations through it.

2. (Proposed but not accepted yet) Allow polymorphic allocators. This would allow different data structures to use different allocators but still have the same type. Basically it would look like 1 above, but instead of keeping an allocator pointer, you would keep a pointer to an allocator interface and perform allocator operations through virtual method calls.