11 February 2007

C++ Programming - not for the faint hearted

Whilst scouring the Adobe ASL website (which contains an open-source GUI toolkit) I encountered a few interesting links and tidbits of information. The ASL is written in C++ utilising sections of Boost (part of which now includes Adobe's on GIL library) and the most hardcore of generic programming techniques.

The most interesting thing I came across was from Alexander Stepanov, the father of the STL, and writer of books about advanced template programming. Alexander Stepanov's Notes is a substantial PDF file (more of a book really) that collates and updates his notes from various lectures including those at Adobe and SGI. It is not entirely about C++ as such, it is just the example language used is C++.

This also lead me to find the Stepanov Papers website which provides a resource for reading his wide selection of papers.

And for a bit more background on Generic programming check out these overviews here and here.