My primary language is Smalltalk (Pharo and GNU Smalltalk) and I didn’t write much C++1x code yet and for a new project I decided to use C++ and experiment. The task was rather simple, receive a message, check if this message type needs to be re-written, start to parse it, make a MongoDB look-up, patch it, send it.

While looking for MongoDB drivers for Qt I only found the pure C++ driver that is working with std::string, exceptions and only offers a blocking interface. At this point I decided to see how painful using stl is these days and opted for a pure stl project. Many years ago the only online documentation came from SGI, there were no examples, no autocompletion in editors, etc…

The application is relatively trivial. It is using lambdas to hook two components (the receiver and the patcher) together, it is using std::thread with lambdas to spawn worker threads because of the blocking interface of the database driver, std::chrono for some ad-hoc StatsD code to add event counters and performance monitoring.

So how did this experiment go?

The C++11/C++14 documentation that is available has improved over the old times, it is still below the quality of the Qt documentation.

Once deploying this on Debian I immediately had odd crashes and I blame ABI issues as my application used C++1x but the mongo-cxx-driver was apparently not using it. I ended up packaging the latest stable (“legacy”) standalone driver for debian and made sure it is compiled with C++1x.

The std::chrono API has potential (as it allows me to control the resolution) but the API, specially in C++11 without the new literals, makes easy things difficult. All I wanted was something like QTimer::elapsed() or QElapsedTimer::elapsed(). So I think the Qt API is better designed for this usecase (my measurement resolution is milliseconds and not picoseconds).

For socket code I was using pure C/libc. As my database code was blocking I could make my socket code blocking as well.

I normally use vim but when working with an unknown API I totally enjoy the comfort QtCreator is providing. I was able to jump to the header files and explore the interface. I think it has saved me quite some time while wrangling with the stl.

New languages come with their own build tools these days (Rust/Cargo, Ruby/Rake, …) and C++1x doesn’t have anything to offer here. The options I considered where autotools, CMake or qmake. I think autotools are overkill here, I dislike CMake for various reasons and I like the simplicity of qmake.

In the past I had played with the Google C++ Unittest framework and actually liked it a lot. These days one is asked to copy and paste the framework into the code base. It is an ongoing struggle if one should embed third party libraries or not but as my application is rather small I decided it is a no go. I have used and enjoyed the Qt testlib. So my STL only application is tested using QObject and QCoreApplication.

Conclusion:

The STL (and the documentation) has improved. I still prefer the API design of Qt and when not just interfacing with an library that is using std::string Qt is still my first choice (as it provides event loops, signals/slots, networking, http, etc.).