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Generic red-black treesGeneric red-black treesPosted Jun 14, 2012 13:49 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)In reply to: Generic red-black trees by slashdot Parent article: Generic red-black trees
What a coincidence. At the very instant you were typing that comment, I was replacing around a thousand lines of duplicated code using exactly that token-pasting technique (this was related to <elf.h> though, and its annoying mass of types with names differing only in 32-vs-64...)
Some of the hoary old C tricks are truly disgusting, but they do work. The preprocessor is horrible, but if you take it away you have to provide *something*, preferably something less horrible, to replace it (as C++ did, but Java notably did not).
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Generic red-black trees Posted Jun 14, 2012 14:08 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
People use dynamic bytecode generation and/or reflection in Java quite often as a replacement for things done with templates/preprocessor.
Generic red-black trees Posted Jun 14, 2012 16:07 UTC (Thu) by etienne (subscriber, #25256) [Link]
Maybe the nice thing about templates/preprocessor is that the work is done once at compilation time, and not each times the software is started.
Also, preprocessor help you to initialise a lot of things which will then be loaded in memory already initialised, ready to use. It is not unheard-of to generate a lot of variable/structure and sort them by the "sort" command in Makefile to have a sorted list ready to use, with pointer to next already set by the linker. That initialised memory will also have good cache locality. Some people may also have tried to use the old "m4" macro language to replace the CPP processor, but it did not stick too nicely.
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