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 for OctaSTD can be found at https://docs.octaforge.org/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.

Tier 1 targets are regularly tested. Tier 2 targets are irregularly tested. Tier 3 targets are rarely or never tested, but most likely working and accepting patches for. Unsupported targets may or may not work depending on their POSIX compliance and ABI.

	Linux	FreeBSD	macOS	Windows	Other BSD	Solaris	AIX	Others
x86	Tier 1	Tier 1	Tier 2	Tier 1	Tier 3	Tier 3	No	No
x86_64	Tier 1	Tier 1	Tier 1	Tier 1	Tier 3	Tier 3	No	No
ARM/AArch64	Tier 2	Tier 2	Tier 3	Tier 3	Tier 3	No	No	No
MIPS32	Tier 3	Tier 3	No	No	Tier 3	No	No	No
PPC32/64	Tier 3	Tier 3	No	No	Tier 3	No	Tier 3	No
Others	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No

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.