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graealex | 4 months ago

These libraries already exist. God how people underestimate C++ all the time.

Of course you can use a unit type that handles conversions AND mathematical operations. Feet to meter cubed and you get m³, and the library will throw a compile error if you try to assign it to anything it doesn't work with (liters would be fine, for example)

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bluGill|4 months ago

I know of about 7 different libraries, 5 of them private to my company (of which 4 are not in use). Every one takes a fundamentally different approach to the problem.

> Feet to meter cubed and you get m³, and the library will throw a compile error if you try to assign it to anything it doesn't work with (liters would be fine, for example)

Liters would not be fine if you are using standard floating point values since you lose precision moving decimal points in some cases. Maybe for your application the values are such that this doesn't matter, but without understanding your problem in depth you cannot make the generic statement.

I could write books (I won't but I could) on all the compromises and trade offs in building a unit type library.

graealex|4 months ago

As a more general rant - people who have maybe used 5% of the feature set of C++ come along and explain why language X is superior because it has feature Y and Z.

News flash, C++ has every conceivable feature, it's the reason why it is so unwieldy. But you can even plug in a fucking GC if you so desire. Let alone stuff like basic meta programming.

rpnx|4 months ago

GC was removed from the C++ standard in C++23 because all the compilers were like "hell no" and it was an optional feature so they could get away with not adding it. So this optional feature never actually existed and they removed it in later standards.

112233|4 months ago

Do they really? Their types really have no custom constructors and you can use designated initializers for your data? I would really much like to have been underestimating C++, could you show an example of such a library?