In article <3aad89ec@news.povray.org> , "Scott Hill" 
<sco### [at] innocentcom> wrote:

> 1. Why, if you use the STL all the time, are you so anti-STL ?

I am not anti-STL*.  It is just that I have seen so many problems when I
used straight-forward simple features of it with more than one compiler.
I think in its current state it is a perfect solution if you have a good
compiler with nearly complete STL support and you don't need
cross-platform code.  But I also think that it is not up to the task of
massive platform independent development yet.  Wait five years, and it
will hopefully no longer be a problem.

>     2. This ivory tower mentality confuses me :
>         Firstly, there are a large number of very talented programmers
> putting a lot of their own spare time into POV patches, patches which are
> now being used to enrich POVs official feature list, surely tapping some of
> this talent could only be of benefit to POV ?

Yes, it could.  I have to admit that my statement portrays an "ivory
tower mentality", but I simply want to avoid certain (in my opinion well
justified) statements that would offend too many people.  In short, some
of the patches, even some bigger ones are incomplete, quick hacks and
nothing more.  Lets leave it at this, please.

>         Secondly, how can you design POV 4.0 without first considering
> factors such as these and wouldn't public discussion of said factors
> actually aid the POV-team - by providing you with pointers to the
> information relevent to that consideration - how can any discussion ever be
> 'premature' ?

Well, you don't plan a house by designing its basement and then consider
the other floors' layout, do you?  Once there is a design of the high
level classes it is easy to decide which containers are actually
needed.  Then one can take a look at STL and see if the needed
containers can be used.  If not, then another solution will be found.

>> NOTE: Opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those
>> of the POV-Team.
>
>     Is this a standard .sig style include ? If not, I'm curious as to why
> you wrote it, considering the number of times you used "we", in the post.

No, it is not a standard signature.  The "we" is used only when I refer
to public statements of the team.  Also, when talking about fixing code,
saying "I" does not really make sense.  All other use is unintentional
and that is why I add the disclaimer.


    Thorsten


NOTE: Opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those
of the POV-Team.


* The rewritten Mac frontend for 3.5, for example, is based on a lot of
STL containers.  Right now the code is under 40K lines / 470KB compiled,
which is small compared to the about 25K lines / 150KB compiled of the
old frontend considering the many new features it offers.  Such compact
source code would not be possible without the STL, and the compiled size
gives a good idea exactly how much the complexity the STL hides (these
stats count only the size of compiled code, excluding libraries and
data).


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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