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International Conference on Software Language Engineering

SLE 2011: Software Language Engineering pp 97–118Cite as

Design of Concept Libraries for C++

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 6940))

Abstract

We present a set of concepts (requirements on template arguments) for a large subset of the ISO C++ standard library. The goal of our work is twofold: to identify a minimal and useful set of concepts required to constrain the library’s generic algorithms and data structures and to gain insights into how best to support such concepts within C++. We start with the design of concepts rather than the design of supporting language features; the language design must be made to fit the concepts, rather than the other way around. A direct result of the experiment is the realization that to simply and elegantly support generic programming we need two kinds of abstractions: constraints are predicates on static properties of a type, and concepts are abstract specifications of an algorithm’s syntactic and semantic requirements. Constraints are necessary building blocks of concepts. Semantic properties are represented as axioms. We summarize our approach: concepts = constraints + axioms. This insight is leveraged to develop a library containing only 14 concepts that encompassing the functional, iterator, and algorithm components of the C++ Standard Library (the STL). The concepts are implemented as constraint classes and evaluated using Clang’s and GCC’s Standard Library test suites.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, USA

    Andrew Sutton & Bjarne Stroustrup

Authors
  1. Andrew Sutton
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  2. Bjarne Stroustrup
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing, Macquarie University, 2109, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Anthony Sloane

  2. Fakultät Informatik, Institut für Software- und Multimediatechnik (SMT), Technische Universität Dresden, Nöthnitzer Straße 46, 01062, Dresden, Germany

    Uwe Aßmann

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Sutton, A., Stroustrup, B. (2012). Design of Concept Libraries for C++. In: Sloane, A., Aßmann, U. (eds) Software Language Engineering. SLE 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6940. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28830-2_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28830-2_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-28829-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-28830-2

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