octastd

Work in progress, not ready for production use.

OctaSTD is an extension of the C++17 standard library which mainly provides ranges (to replace iterators) but also various other utilities like proper streams, string formatting, coroutines, concurrency utilities and others. It's meant to replace the more poorly designed parts of the C++ standard library to make the language easier and more convenient to use.

It is not feature complete right now, as most things are still being worked on.

Documentation (currently outdated and incomplete) for OctaSTD can be found at https://wiki.octaforge.org/docs/octastd.

Supported compilers

Compiler	Version
gcc/g++	7+
clang	4+

You need those mainly to get the right standard library version (libstdc++ or libc++). Other compilers might work as well, as long as the necessary standard library features are supplied.

MSVC++ is unsupported and for the time being will remain unsupported. As of MS Visual Studio 2017 RC, basic C++11 features are still broken and prevent usage of the library, with no reasonable workarounds. I will be testing new versions as they get released and mark it supported as soon as it actually works, but no active effort will be put towards making it work. On Windows, you're free to use GCC/Clang, if you need Visual Studio, LLVM integration exists.

Why is C++17 necessary?

Sadly, it's not possible to properly integrate std::string and std::hash with OctaSTD ranges without utilizing std::string_view. Also, C++17 provides library features that OctaSTD would have to implement otherwise, which would lead to potentially incompatible APIs. C++17 also provides some nice language features (such as if constexpr and fold expressions) which allow a lot of code to be written in a cleaner way. However, it is made sure that no features beyond the minimum supported compiler are necessary to use the library.

Supported operating systems and architectures

OctaSTD targets POSIX compliant operating systems and Windows. Features are written with those in mind, and other targets are currently not supported.

The primary targets (regularly tested) are Linux, FreeBSD and Windows on x86 and x86_64 as well as macOS on x86_64. Secondary targets (irregularly tested) are Linux and FreeBSD on ARM, AArch64 as well as macOS on x86. Tertiary targets (rarely tested or untested but probably working and accepting patches for) are other BSDs, Solaris and AIX on x86, x86_64, ARM, AArch64, MIPS32 and PPC32/64 as well as other previously mentioned systems on architectures not included in their Tier 1 or 2 support. Other targets are unsupported (might or might not work, depending on POSIX compliance and ABI).

Coroutines

Coroutines use platform specific assembly code taken from Boost.Context. There is assembly for all of the targets mentioned above.

There is also support for stack allocators inspired again by the Boost.Context library, with fixed size protected and unprotected allocators available on all platforms, as well as a stack pool which allocates stacks in batches and recycles dead stacks.

Compile with the OSTD_USE_VALGRIND macro defined if you want useful Valgrind output when using coroutines - this makes Valgrind aware of the custom stacks.