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by asermersheim
4024 days ago
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Cross platform portability is a major goal of the CopperSpice project. Autotools may be old but it still beats its competitors for portability to obscure platforms. We have removed moc and added templates but it is by no means black magic. The complexities are below the surface and we worked very hard to create a clean API for developers. Since you mention you are on MSVC which is a bit behind the curve in standards compliance, you may be unaware of the wonderful tools that C++11 now provides for generating simple and readable template error messages. We have made extensive use of static assertions for specifically this reason. The vast majority of errors are quite straightforward. As a bonus, many conditions which are run time errors in Qt are caught and diagnosed at compile time in CopperSpice. I will take a compile error, however inscrutable, over a guaranteed runtime failure any day. |
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And obscure platforms - are you targetting those as a priority? That could explain your choice of build system. On the other hand, the obscure platforms tend to have old, noncompliant C++ compilers and STL, so I am not completely sure how is that going to work together with your C++11 requirement. For me an "obscure platform" would be something like an IRIX 6.5, Solaris or some embedded hardware. Good luck with requiring C++11 there.
Of course, you could be targeting an obscure platform in the sense that it is one of the few that actually ships with fully C++11 compliant compiler, but then good luck with wide adoption of your software ...
Re compile errors vs runtime errors - agreed, even though most runtime errors related to moc in Qt are things like connecting to non-existing slot. That generates only an error message in console/log, it is not a fatal error.
However, moc gets you faster compilation time (heavily templated C++ takes ages to compile - just look at Boost) and more readable/idiomatic code. And then there is the portability issue to older compilers - templates were traditionally the poster child for poor/incomplete implementations by the compiler vendors.