Subject: Re: [boost] [metaparse] Practical usefulness
From: Phil Endecott (spam_from_boost_dev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-06-03 11:39:01
Abel Sinkovics wrote:
> This approach to write a type-safe printf displays the characters
> one-by-one on an output stream. The printf library in Mpllibs does the
> validation at compile-time and calls the "unsafe" printf at runtime (and
> has therefore no runtime overhead).
Well that's assuming that printf() is efficient at runtime.
I would like to hope that
string s = "hello" + t + "world";
would be more efficient than
string s = wrapper_around_printf_returning_string("hello%sworld",t.c_str());
If it isn't, we're in trouble :-)
This reminds me of a discussion on this list back in 2008 where
I was investigating fast ways of checking whether a character is in
a compile-time set of characters:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/171117
In effect, I implement a template like
is_any_of<'a','e','i','o','u'>(c)
or better
is_any_of<"aeiou">(c)
to compute
return c=='a' || c=='e' || c=='i' || c=='o' || c=='u';
In that thread, I demonstrated that this was faster than looping
over the characters at run-time:
bool is_any_of(const char* chars, char c) { return strchr(chars,c); }
The challenge is to instead convert it to something that does
O(log N) comparisons, rather than O(N) i.e.
if (c < 'i') return is_any_of<'a','e'>(c);
else return is_any_of<'i','o','u'>(c);
Does this have any relevance to Metaparse? I'm not sure. I think
the hard part of this is the "meta code generation", not the "meta
parsing". I mention it because of the string-to-char-pack stuff.
Regards, Phil.