Re: [Doxygen-develop] doxygen and standard C++ library

[Dimitri v. H. <do...@gm...>]

Hi Johnk,

> On 06 Apr 2015, at 16:58 , johnk <jk...@ar...> wrote:
> 
> Dimitri, as I work on some enhancements for Doxygen, is there any reason 
> I shouldn't use std as opposed to "qtools"?  The first enhancement I 
> did, some additional capabilities for markdown tables (column and row 
> spans), I used std.  The PlantUML enhancements I'm working on would 
> really benefit from std, but I wanted to be sure there wasn't a reason 
> not to implement things that way.

I try to keep doxygen's code very portable. As a result I have avoided using STL. 

You can of course say: but hey STL is *the* standard library supported by any compiler.
While that somewhat true it wasn't very well supported back in the days (remember I started
with doxygen in 1997) and still it is tempting to use stuff (like C++11 or boost) that is not 
generally supported on all platforms or drags in additional dependencies. 

Also STL uses exceptions whereas doxygen doesn't. So if any STL class throws an exception,
doxygen will crash.

My claim is that it is still hard to write portable code using STL.
I'm not alone: see also the Mozilla guidelines: 
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/C++_Portability_Guide

So what do you need that is in STL, but not in qtools?

Regards,
  Dimitri