Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate

For me it's a love hate relationship. I love the way I can generate efficient code from terse, readable source. I hate the way compile errors get weirder and weirder, the the latter may be as much an implementation issue as anything. Templates are really just a highly automated form of cut and paste that allows you to create *maintainable* cut and paste code, and package it for general use.

The extent to which cut and paste code abuses the processor cache says more about the programmer than the mechanism. I use partially specialized templates to create efficient variant forms of low level graphical operations. The initial pure C code base I developed to do the same thing grew tendrils and degenerated to to an unmaintainable state rapidly so that working on it slowed down and became deeply unappetizing. After being recast as an orthogonal set of C++ templates the source code shrank by a multiple and I was able to add the sophisticated new capabilities that seemed only a distantly obtainable hope with the original C code base. The actual generated code hardly changed, just my ability to develop it.