- remove unnecessary includes
- expunge all remaining usages of boost::format
- able to leave out the expliti string(elm) in output
- drop various operator<<, since we're now picking up
custom string conversions automatically
- delete diagnostics headers, which are now largely superfluous
- use newer helper functions occasionally
I didn't blindly change any usage of <iostream> though;
sometimes, just using the output streams right away
seems adequate.
our minimal compiler requirement is gcc-4.9 since the
transition to Debian/Jessie as reference system.
gcc-4.9 is known to treat SFINAE on private fields properly
this is a stripped-down and very leightweight variant
of the well-known enable_if metaprogramming trick.
Providing this standard variant in a header with minimal
dependencies will allow us to phase out boost inclusions
from many further headers. As a plus, our own variant
is written such as to be more conciese in usage
(no "typename" and no acces of an embedded "::type" menber)
Note: the new Variant implementation is a re-write from scratch
and does not rely on util::AccessCasted any more. Anyway, both
are now thoroughly covered by unit test
NOTE: this was a one-time verification. Unfortunately there is no way
to verify a failing compilation automatically from a unit-test.
Thus we need to comment out these invalid cases, leaving them
here just for later referral. Need to check those manually
for new compilers to be sure!
...since I consider that a comparatively safe convenience feature.
Of course we *do perform* a NULL check and throw an exception.
So now the actual casting or conversion functions are designed
to work always on the same level of references or pointers,
which means we can just use the standard conversions of the
language. This has the nice effect of ruling out dangerous
combinations (like taking a L-ref from a R-ref) automatically
(extracted from the git history of file try.cpp, May 2008)
basically this is the draft implementation from which
AccessCasted was extracted. I see two problems
- this version prints from within the access functions
- we do not want the automatic static downcast anymore.
meanwhile, I consider this kind of "do everything for me"
programming style as dangerous. If unchecked donwcasts
are desired, then code them up explicitly
In Clang, static object fields are initialised from top to bottom,
but before any other variables in anoymous namespaces. To the contrary,
GCC evaluates *any* initialisation expression in the translation
unit together from top to bottom. Thus, in the clang generated
code, in two cases the static initialisation could use a not yet
constructed local lib::_Fmt formatter object.
Conversion means automatic conversion. In our case,
what we need ist the ability to *construct* a bool from
our (function) object -- while functors aren't automatically
convertible to bool. Thus we use one of the new predicates
from <type_traits>
to make them stand out more prominently, some entity comments
where started with a line of starts. Unfortunately, doxygen
(and javadoc) only recogise comments which are started exactly
with /**
This caused quite some comments to be ignored by doxygen.
Credits to Hendrik Boom for spotting this problem!
A workaround is to end the line of stars with *//**
Clang seems to evaluate the terms of a function call in another order
than GCC -- this uncovered re-entrance errors in some metaprogramming tests,
where we re-used a global formatter object in recursive instantiations.
using our util::_Fmt front-end helps to reduce the code size,
since all usages rely on a single inclusion of boost::format
including boost::format via header can cause quite some code bloat
NOTE: partial solution, still some further includes to reorganise
the buildsystem will now pick up and link
all test cases according to the layer, e.g.
backend tests will automatically be linked
against the backend + library solely.
