Tom Goodale wrote:
It is not really much more readable than 4a1. Therefore, I'm uncertain if it is worth fragmenting our approach to bindings in different languages when there is not a clear benefit in terms of readability or implementation complexity.
I think that 4a2/4a3 actually allow nicer implementations, as it allows to have the different async parts somewhat separate from the sync parts. We think its nicer :-)
4a3 the only implementation in a C++ like manner I can think of, which provides: - an interface which conforms to modern C++ concepts pushed by Boost et.al. - it avoids not needed overhead if some of the features are not needed/used (this gets optimised away by any decent C++ compiler)
Well, if the compiler can actually take advantage of that syntactical convention to apply more efficient optimizations, then that is a clear advantage to that approach (whether or not I find the syntax obscure).
_S_AGA. If it is obscure to you or others, its not a good choice. Performance is a second order issue. However, as I
Also, we have not used templates anywhere else in the abstract API, so I think it would be a bad idea to move that way now. This does not preclude the C++ language binding using such if there is a clear benefit.
I agree here. There was a bit of misunderstanding from my side. You were talking about the the SAGA spec but I was talking about the C++ language binding. Could we find a way of doing both, describing a more or less general interface in the spec and giving some freedom of implementation to the language bindings?
On a practical note, templates are one of the least portable features of C++, especially in libraries (except template libraries), and I would strongly urge that we do not use them for SAGA.
We will probably end up writing a C language binding for the affected architectures in the end anyway... But let's first solve the problem for the 99% of the architectures where your concern is a no-issue. It's a matter of how much time is required to do the C++ implementation in the end. And using templates will give a speedup to this for sure. Regards Hartmut