[Development] What kind of airplane we want to build?

[Kevin Kofler]

Ziller Eike wrote:
>> I would like that trend to continue. The likely next candidates are
>> threads, futures and locks.
> 
> +1

I wonder why everyone so far agreed on that. So let me dissent: I think 
having these things in Qt with Qt-style APIs is a good thing and I don't see 
why we should discard our solution for the STL one. At most, where it makes 
sense, we could wrap the STL stuff as we're doing with std::atomic.

> I find it much nicer and more readable if I can just write sort(v).

+1!

And I don't think ranges are the answer here. It's just another layer of 
overengineered abstraction (as they will surely be implemented as a pair of 
iterators in practice) when in 99+% of the cases you just want to operate on 
the whole container anyway.

> Or "const List foos = transformed(myThings, &Thing::foo);"
> instead of "List foos; std::transform(myThings.begin(), myThings.end(),
> std::back_inserter(foos), std::mem_fn(&Thing::foo));” (notice that “foos”
> is also not const in the “pure" std version)

Wow, the STL version is horrible! std::back_inserter is particularly ugly, 
and the usual misleading STL name (which suggests "backwards", when actually 
it means "to the back", so when inserting multiple elements, forward) does 
not help either.

> We started some experiments with convenience wrappers for std algorithms
> for use in Qt Creator when we started requiring C++11:
> http://code.qt.io/cgit/qt-creator/qt-creator.git/tree/src/libs/utils/algorithm.h

Interesting. That could be a starting point for a QtAlgorithms successor.

>> why do they use C++ if they so hate it?
> 
> Maybe they don’t hate it, but still wished it had a less verbose API if
> you don’t need the verbosity.

The funny thing is that only redundant boilerplate is verbose in the STL. 
The stuff that matters, the API names, are horribly terse (e.g. "deque").

And I don't hate the C++ language, only its standard library. The language 
is actually great, much better than Java or Python. So, since Qt lets me not 
touch the STL with a 10-foot pole, I see no problem with using C++. (Qt is 
also by far the best class library out there.)

        Kevin Kofler