[fpc-devel] Generic Programming Units

[Dean Zobec]

Marco van de Voort wrote:

>>The generic functions are very powerful and model closely the C++ STL
>>library (as fpc does not have generics yet a sort of typecast is still
>>required when fetching the items from the container). The library was
>>not designed for speed though, from the first test the DArray class is
>>twice as slow then the TFPList for example).  Anyway, I think it's a
>>good start, since as I've seen from the wiki, we'll not have generics in
>>fpc available soon (I would be glad to contribute to the generics
>>implementation, but this but is still beyond my current poor fpc
>>knowledge :( ) . When our compiler will support generics, if Decal will
>>be fully covered by unit tests I think it will be easier to convert to it.
>>    
>>
>
>At work, I have found out that decal is too bulky and too slow for some
>purposes (I've lists with millions of objects in memory). _each_ entry in
>a decal container eats 78 byte (with D6 memory manager, but will only be
>equal or larger with FPC)
>  
>
I can immagine,  the DObject is a TVarRec.  The problem with speed and
memory usage are the things that I don't like in Decal and it still
makes me wonder if it would be better to reimplement a containers
library from scratch, if we had generics to add type checking at compile
time... I'm looking at all the options (time is a limited resource :).

>For this, I implemented dirty, but very fast maps and sets. These are not
>generic, but fast, and with FPC they can really fly due to inline
>capabilities. See
>
>http://www.stack.nl/~marcov/lightcontainers.zip
>  
>
Thank you, I'll take a look in the next few days. Maybe we could build
on this instead.

>  
>
>>projects/contrib/decal. I've began to clean the unit to make it more
>>readable, moving the comments in a fpdoc xml file and restoring a proper
>>indentation.
>>    
>>
>
>I have a tex version of the decal docs somewhere.
>
>http://www.stack.nl/~marcov/decal.tex  (might use some FPC tex docs files)
>
>  
>
Thank you, I had your pdf but not the tex file.

Ciao, Dean