[Nel] matrix.cpp std::min/max problems?

Fri, 10 Nov 2000 03:43:08 -0800 (PST)

Heh, well sorry but that's MS for ya...  
+
+As I recall, if you go MFC-free this particular issue will vanish.
+However there are other insidious STL bugs with Visual C++.
+
+If in fact you are using MFC, I would urge you to cease doing so at the
+earliest convenience.  Not only for portability reasons (MFC *ain't*
+portable, especially not backwards-wise) but also because it is a poor
+architecture for GUI development, and is not really in the GPL spirit of
+things.  If you intend to conduct your development openly as a net
+project, then crossplatformness is going to be especially treasured by
+you.  There are many options for crossplatform GUI libs.  Let me know if
+you'd like to discuss this more.  My two preferred libs are wxWindows
+(good for OS-matching widgets for editors and similar), or libuta (SDL
+compatible and skinnable).  Mozilla has another cross platform GUI lib
+but I've not used it in its current incarnation so don't know whether
+it's usable independently of Mozilla.
+
+FWIW, I always stick this boilerplate code in any file that uses STL
+that I'd like to compile with MSVC 4.2:
+
+#ifdef _MSC_VER
+// Fix broken STL implementation in MSVC 4.2
+// Include files (for MSVC)
+#pragma warning(disable: 4786)  // Kludge to get around bug in MSVC 4.2
+#pragma warning(disable: 4788)  // See above
+#endif
+
+I think you may be stuck including your own max/min template functions.
+That's a pretty minor thing compared with some of the patches you may
+have to make to work around some of the other issues (especially if you
+want to support pre-6.0 MSVC).  
+
+Ultimately, you're going to want to trim down use of STL anyway, so you
+can recover the performance loss.  We still use STL at WorldForge, for
+instance, but some simple tests show that hand coded, non-templated map
+and list classes provide some modest performance gains, and some day
+when we're down to squeezing out the last bits of performance, we'll
+probably be pulling STL out ourselves.
+
+Bryce
+
+On Fri, 10 Nov 2000, Vianney Lecroart wrote:
+
+> > The VC++/STL min/max problem is pretty well known, and is a result of a
+> > very buggy STL implementation in VC++, and some lawsuits.
+> >
+> > Simple answer:  Define NOMINMAX in your Build Settings
+> 
+> ok, this define disables the macro min & max, it's same behavior as doing
+> #undef min #undef max
+> but I search min in the VC include directory and subdirectory and there s
+> *no* min
+> definition in the STL (no template min) so we have to define our own min &
+> max
+> template function in our code... no very cool...
+
+-- 
+Bryce Harrington
+bryce @ neptune.net
+
+
+