gamedevlists-general

[GD-General] stl on consoles

[Raymond L. M. <ra...@wa...>]

    Hello!  I seriously do not want this to turn into some sort of =
programming war but I just want to hear the experiences and knowledge of =
fellow game developers on this subject.  Here we go.  I've used STL =
before in my PC products and I happen to like it.  I like that the =
algorithms are solid and very complete, and some of the containers such =
as the std::map are invaluable to me.  The biggest gripe I've had with =
it was debugging.  If you have an iterator than getting to the actual =
data in the debugger is horrible (unless there is some other way to =
access it I don't know).  The other problem was with the memory =
allocations and that unless you specify an allocator it allocates as it =
sees fit.  Now on the PC I wasn't too worried about the allocation bit =
and I figured the operating system would take care of the memory =
management and everything would be fine (which it was). Now today I'm =
developing a console game (PS2/XBox) where memory is a precious resource =
not to be spent carelessly.  I know that Pete Isensee has written an =
article on overriding the memory allocator in Game Gems 3 that should =
take care of the allocation problem.  I still get the feeling that STL =
is not very common in console programming and would like to know why.  =
I've written my own templated container types, except for std::map, =
which seem nice and light and much easier to debug but I'm not sure if I =
should use them if STL provides them and there are no penalties for =
using them(memory problems, code bloat, unsuitable routines for the =
cpu).  If you could please tell me if you are working on a console title =
using STL or not and why you do or do not use them.  I appreciate =
everybody's time and thank you.

    Raymond L. Maple
    WayForward Technologies

P.S. I posted this on gda...@li... but was =
told it was an inappropriate subject for that list so I'm posting it =
here also.

[GD-General] Re: stl on consoles

[Enno R. <en...@de...>]

I can't speak from experience about stl on consoles, haven't used it. But 
one problem I see that you haven't mentioned and I haven't seen discussed is 
symbol size. STL debug symbols tend to be big - I wrote a sample application 
using luabind the other day, which uses boost and some funky template stuff 
to create C++ bindings for lua. The executable was 400 K without debug 
symbols, and 16 MB with debug symbols. That wouldn't have fit on a console, 
ever.

I think that for XBOX at least, you can keep the debugging symbols off the 
actual console, in a PDB file, but I'm not sure if that's the way all 
consoles handle it - thinking about it, they probably do. Has anyone got 
more console experience than me?

Even then, the excessive inlining you get eith STL code is going to bloat 
your executable, and on some platforms you can't grow it much. On the 
gamecube, Nintendo won't let you make executables bigger than 4MB, for 
example, so this could conceivably become an issue.

Enno.