Paul Fultz II
Here some points I see as I have been reviewing Hana. I see you have made some changes on github, so maybe some of this doesn't apply anymore.
The changes I made are only to develop, so whatever you say is still applicable to master.
- Dot shouldn't be used in names, underscores should be used instead.
This will be modified, since it was asked for by 3 different persons so far. For future reference, you can refer to [1] for the status of this issue.
- `fold` and `reverse_fold` should be preferred over `fold_right` and ``fold_left`. This is more familiar to C++ programmers.
First, to my knowledge, the only libraries that even define fold and/or reverse_fold are Fusion and MPL, so it's not like there was an undeniable precedent for using those names instead of something else in C++. But even then, `fold` and `reverse_fold` functions are provided for consistency with those libraries, so I really don't see what's the problem. If you prefer those names, you can use them and they have exactly the same semantics as their Fusion counterpart.
- Concepts are capitalized, however, models of a concept should not be capitalized(such as `IntregralConstant`, `Either`, `Lazy`, `Optional`, `Tuple`, etc)
`IntegralConstant`, `Tuple`, etc... are tags used for tag dispatching,
like Fusion's `vector_tag` & friends. I can't use a non-capitalized
version as-is, because it's going to clash with `integral_constant`.
Also, I find that using something like `tuple_tag` is uglier than using
`Tuple`. Consider for example
make
- IntregralConstant is very strange. In Hana, its not a concept(even though its capitalized), but rather a so called "data type". Furthermore, because of this strangeness it doesn't interoperate with other IntregralConstants(such as from Tick) even though all the operators are defined.
IntegralConstant is not a concept, that's true. The fact that it does not interoperate with Tick's IntegralConstants out-of-the-box has nothing to do with that, however. You must make your Tick integral constants a model of Hana's Constant concept for it to work. See the gist at [2] for how to do that.
- The `.times` seems strange and should be a free function so it works with any IntregralConstant.
The idea of having a `.times` member function comes from Ruby [3]. I personally think it is expressive and a simple tool for a simple job. The syntax is also much cleaner than using a non-member function. Consider int_<10>.times([]{ std::cout << "foo" << std::endl; }); times(int_<10>, []{ std::cout << "foo" << std::endl; }); However, as we've been discussing in this issue [4], I might add an equivalent non-member function.
- In the section 'Taking control of SFINAE', seems like it could be solved a lot simpler and easier using `overload_linear`.
First, `overload_linearly` is an implementation detail, since I've moved the Functional module out of the way to give me the possibility of using Fit in the future. However, your point is valid; I could also write the following instead: auto optionalToString = hana::overload_linearly( [](auto&& x) -> decltype(x.toString()) { return x.toString(); }, [](auto&&) -> std::string { return "toString not defined"; } ); This approach is fine for the optionalToString function, which is rather simple. I wanted to show how to use Optional to control compile-time empty-ness in complex cases, so I'll just expand this section or change the example to something that is really better solved using Optional. Thanks for the heads up; you can refer to this issue [5] in the future.
- Concepts refer to 'superclasses' these should be listed either as refinements or listed under the requirements section(which seem to be missing). It would be nicer if the concepts were documented like how they are at cppreference: http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/concept
This was fixed on develop. I now use the term "Refined concept" instead of "Superclass". Regarding concept requirements, they are listed in the "minimal complete definition" section of each concept. Then, semantic properties that must be satisfied are explained in the "laws" section.
- Concepts make no mention of minimum type requirement such as MoveConstructible.
I believe the right place to put this would be in the documentation of concrete models like `Tuple`, but not in the concepts (like `Sequence`). Hana's concepts operate at a slightly higher level and they do not really have a notion of storage. But I agree that it is necessary to document these requirements. Please refer to this issue [6] for status.
- Organization of documentation could be better. Its nice showing what algorithms when the user views a concept, but it would be better if all the algorithms could be viewed together.
I assume you are talking about the reference documentation and not the tutorial. I agree that it could be easier to look for algorithms. There are also other quirks I'd like to see gone. The problem is that Doxygen is pretty inflexible, and I'm already tweaking it quite heavily. I'm considering either using a different tool completely or making some changes in the organization of the reference. Your more precise comment about viewing algorithms on their own page is already tracked by this issue [7].
- For compile-time `Iterable` sequence(which is all you support right now), `is_empty` can be inferred, and should be optional.
How can it be inferred?
- Overall, I think the Concepts could be simplified. They seem to be too complicated, and it leads to many surprises which seem to not make sense(such as using `Range` or `String` with `concat` or using `tick::integral_constant`).
1. Concatenating ranges does not make sense. A Hana Range is a contiguous sequence of compile-time integers. What happens when you concatenate `make_range(0_c, 3_c)` with `make_range(6_c, 10_c)`? It's not contiguous anymore, so it's not a Range anymore. 2. Concatenating strings makes complete sense, indeed. This could be handled very naturally by defining a `Monoid` model, but it was not done because I did not like using `+` for concatenating strings :-). I opened this issue [8] to try and find a proper resolution. 3. Tick's integral_constants can be handled as I explained in the gist at [2]. As a fundamental library, Hana was designed to be very general and extensible in ways I couldn't possibly foresee. Hence, I could have stuck with Fusion's concept hierarchy (minus iterators), but that would have been less general than what I was aiming for. Also, Hana is slightly biased towards functional programming, and it reflects in the concepts. If that is what you mean by "complicated", then I'd say this generality and power is a feature rather than a bug. I would really like to know specifically which concepts you find too complicated or superfluous. There are definitely things that could be improved, but in general I am very content with the current hierarchy and I think this is one of Hana's strengths, to be frank.
- Currently, none of the algorithms are constrained, instead it uses `static_assert`, which I think is bad for a library that is targeting modern compilers.
People have mixed opinions about this. I personally think the last thing you
want is for an overload to SFINAE-out because of some failure deep down the
call chain, considering we're working with heterogeneous objects. I think
the best way to go is to fail very fast and very explicitly with a nice
static_assert message, which is what Hana tries very hard to do.
I also think the minority of people that would benefit from having SFINAE
friendly algorithms is largely outweighted by the majority of non template
metaprogramming gurus (likely not reading this list) who would rather have
a nice and helpful `static_assert` message explaining what they messed up.
Also, there's the problem that being SFINAE-friendly could hurt compile-time
performance, because everytime you call an algorithm we'd have to check
whether it's going to compile. However, because we're working with dependent
types, checking whether the algorithm compiles requires doing the algorithm
itself, which is in general costly. We could however emulate this by using
the Tag system. For example, `fold_left` could be defined as:
template
- It would be nice if the use of variable templates would be optional(and not used internally), since without inline variables, it can lead to ODR violations and executable bloat.
Without variable templates, we would have to write `type<T>{}`, `int_<1>{}`, etc.. all of the time instead of `type<T>` and `int_<1>`. Sure, that's just two characters, but considering you couldn't even rely on what is `type<T>` (if it were a type, since `decltype(type<T>)` is currently unspecified), we're really not gaining much. In short; no variable templates means a less usable library, without much benefits (see next paragraph). Regarding variable templates and ODR, I thought variable templates couldn't lead to ODR violations? I know global function objects (even constexpr) can lead to ODR violations, but I wasn't aware about the problem for variable templates. I would appreciate if you could show me where the problem lies more specifically. Also, for reference, there's a defect report [9] related to global constexpr objects, and an issue tracking this problem here [10]. Finally, regarding executable bloat, we're talking about stateless constexpr objects here. At worst, we're talking 1 byte per object. At best (and most likely), we're talking about 0 bytes because of link time optimizations. Otherwise, I could also give internal linkage to the global objects and they would probably be optimized away by the compiler itself, without even requiring LTO. Am I dreaming?
Overall, I would like to see Hana compile on more compilers before it gets accepted into boost(currently it doesn't even compile on my macbook).
What compiler did you try to compile it with? Also, an important GCC bug that was preventing Hana from working properly on GCC was fixed a couple of days ago, so I'm going to try to finish the port ASAP and I'm fairly confident that it should work on GCC 5.2. Thanks for all your comments. Regards, Louis [1]: https://github.com/ldionne/hana/issues/114 [2]: https://gist.github.com/ldionne/32f61a7661d219ca834d#file-main-cpp [3]: http://ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/Integer.html#method-i-times [4]: https://github.com/ldionne/hana/issues/100 [5]: https://github.com/ldionne/hana/issues/115 [6]: https://github.com/ldionne/hana/issues/116 [7]: https://github.com/ldionne/hana/issues/82 [8]: https://github.com/ldionne/hana/issues/117 [9]: http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/cwg_active.html#2104 [10]: https://github.com/ldionne/hana/issues/76