Libraries

The philosophy of STLSoft is very simple: providing robust and lightweight STL-compliant software to the development community. STLSoft attempst to do the near-impossible: marry STL with the UNIX principles of Usability and Discoverability. I think it achieves this for the most part , but then I would think that, wouldn't I? I invite you to install and use it, and let me know whether you think?

The STLSoft libraries are 100% header-only, and are divided into 8 sub-projects:

Since I was refining libraries right down to the wire of the release of the CD, there've been several changes subsequent to the preparation of version 1.7.1, so I've included a beta - stlsoft_icpp_beta.zip - which includes all the changes to date. Also, please make sure you visit the STLSoft website since version 1.8 may have been released by the time Imperfect C++ is published.

recls (recursive ls)is the exemplar project from my Positive Integration column for C/C++ User's Journal. It is a platform-independent recursive search library - for file-systems and, as of version 1.5.1, able to do FTP searches - written in C/C++ and presenting a C-API.

It also includes mappings to other languages/technologies, currently including C++, COM, C#/.NET, D, Java, Ruby and STL. recls uses the STLSoft libraries, but other than that is standalone.

Since I was refining libraries right down to the wire of the release of the CD, there've been several changes subsequent to the preparation of version 1.5.2, so I've included a beta - recls_icpp_beta.zip - which includes all the changes to date. Also, please make sure you visit the recls website since version 1.6 will have been released by the time Imperfect C++ is published.

The Open-RJ project came about as the result of a need for a simple configuration file format and reader. The RJ stands for Record Jar, as espoused by the excellent book The Art of UNIX Programming.

Essentially, the record jar format looks like the following:

 %% Record terminator - in this case, the record has no fields
 %% Record terminator - Record terminators are also comments
 Name:       The name of this simple record
 %% All fields from prior delimiter comprise this record
 Label:      A field in the second record
 Description:This is a long field so it can be split over \
             multiple lines. But note that you cannot split \
             record terminator lines. That's about the only \
             restriction in this very free format.
 %%
 < . . . and so on and so on, until the end of file >
 %% - the final record terminator.

This format is ridiculously easy to edit, generate and comprehend. Higher level structures can be layered over it with relative ease.

As is my wont, I've already mapped the library to C++, Ruby and STL, and it is tested on both Linux and Win32. The version included on the CD is the first beta, so it's not guaranteed to be perfect. Having said that, I've used the Ruby extension to generate most of the content of this CD, and it worked perfectly. The main issue is that there's no documentation as yet. However, there are sample data files, and samples written in C, C++ and STL which clearly show its use.

By the time you get this CD, the library should have been released, documentation written, and other languages mapped. I strongly suggest you visit the project home page at http://openrj.org/, and obtain the latest version. Even better: why don't you join the project and help out?

This is the small segment of the Synesis Software libraries - from which many of the other libraries listed here originally sprang - that is publicly available. The Synesis libraries have been evolving since the early 1990s, but have stagnated a little in the last 4-5 years as their components have been rewritten and repackaged in these child libraries. The children've left the old girl behind now, not only technically, but also in coding style and organisation, so don't expect to see pretty code. It's pretty ugly stuff, but it's pretty thoroughly tested: this code is running inside several commercial programs which've run unbroken for several years.

The version of Arturius included on the CD currently needs a few components from this library, but I intend to break that dependency by the next release, which will probably have happened by the time the book is published. So please keep up to date with news about Arturius at its website http://www.arturius.org/, and with news in general on the Imperfect C++ website.

This is a small, simple, test-only quality, library that provides emulation of various UNIX APIs on the Win32 operating system. I use it for testing UNIXSTL components from within Win32 development environments. It is not to be used for any commercial products - for that try CygWin - but as a test-bed it's proved immensely useful over the last few years.

The Boost web site provides free peer-reviewed portable C++ source libraries. The emphasis is on libraries which work well with the C++ Standard Library. The libraries are intended to be widely useful, and are in regular use by thousands of programmers across a broad spectrum of applications.

A further goal is to establish "existing practice" and provide reference implementations so that Boost libraries are suitable for eventual standardization. Ten Boost libraries will be included in the C++ Standards Committee's upcoming C++ Standard Library Technical Report as a step toward becoming part of a future C++ Standard.

Although Boost was begun by members of the C++ Standards Committee Library Working Group, participation has expanded to include thousands programmers from the C++ community at large.

Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It consists of two parts: A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a Linux emulation layer providing substantial Linux API functionality, and a collection of tools, which provide Linux look and feel.

The POSIX 1003.1-2001 standard defines an application programming interface (API) for writing multithreaded applications. This interface is known more commonly as pthreads. A good number of modern operating systems include a threading library of some kind: Solaris (UI) threads, Win32 threads, DCE threads, DECthreads, or any of the draft revisions of the pthreads standard. The trend is that most of these systems are slowly adopting the pthreads standard API, with application developers following suit to reduce porting woes.

Win32 does not, and is unlikely to ever, support pthreads natively. This project seeks to provide a freely available and high-quality solution to this problem

zlib is designed to be a free, general-purpose, legally unencumbered -- that is, not covered by any patents -- lossless data-compression library for use on virtually any computer hardware and operating system. The zlib data format is itself portable across platforms. Unlike the LZW compression method used in Unix compress(1) and in the GIF image format, the compression method currently used in zlib essentially never expands the data. (LZW can double or triple the file size in extreme cases.) zlib's memory footprint is also independent of the input data and can be reduced, if necessary, at some cost in compression.