Simple Application Framework

Simple Application Framework is a library aiming at providing a rich set of generic classes and functions enabling rapid development of robust and safe applications. The library is written in C++ and places emphasis on clean and extensible object-oriented design and efficient algorithms. It is intended as a replacement and extension of the Standard Template Library (STL) that would be closer to modern trends in IT represented by the Base Class Library in .NET or the Java Class Library.

What are the main design goals?

• Generic programming
• Clean, efficient, easily understandable, reusable and portable code
• Transparent code organization (nested namespaces)
• Support for modern and the most common compilers and platforms

In particular, we would like to:

• Don't make things unnecesarilly complex
• Avoid obscure template patterns and jungle of macros that are hard to understand, configure and debug
• Avoid compiler or platform specific hacks as much as possible
• Avoid ugly low-level or ad-hoc optimizations in places where the compiler can do it itself (and often better)
• Avoid code bloat by prefering the main design goals to backwards compatibility and archaic compiler support
• Use C++ and its advanced features wisely, the language can be a beast

What is it going to contain?

• Fundamental computer science algorithms and data structures useful in everyday work
• Unicode strings and characters, type-safe and easy-to-use string formatting interface
• Date and time handling
• Filesystem access routines
• Basic networking support
• Random number generators
• Regular expressions
• Thread support and synchronization mechanisms
• Extendable logging system
• Simple math classes and functions (powers, commond divisors and multiples, vectors, matrices, etc.)
• A lot more...

What is it not going to contain?

• GUI handling
• Advanced, complex or specialized stuff that is rarely needed

Why not STL?

• It is too limited in its scope, it doesn't offer functions that are needed on daily basis (see above)
• There were many inconsistencies in the old standard:
  • Assignment operator of std::valarray does not resize
  • std::numeric_limits<float>::min() is a positive number
  • Different complexity of stl::list::size() and splice() methods in different compilers
  • Unintuitive and error-prone rules to use std::swap relying on the argument-dependent lookup
  • Broken std::vector<bool> implementation
• The new C++11 fixes some of the problems but not all and probably will introduce new ones
• If there is a problem in the STL, it takes decades to fix it (new standard is required) which is unacceptable
• STL has no structure at all
• Formatting via std::cout is a nightmare to use in practice compared to good old printf
• The unicode support is another nightmare - std::string, std::wstring, char, wchar_t, unicode and multi-byte encodings...
• Although the standard gives basic complexity guarantees of the containers in the STL, the actual speed and memory consumption is very different in different STL implementations
• There are many hidden algorithms in the STL (e.g., the insertion sort) that are used internally but not exposed to the user for some reason
• The naming convention of STL (lowercase and underscores in class/file/function names) is substantially different from that used in C# or Java

Why not Boost?

Boost is a great library that solved many problems of the STL and introduced many important concepts. However, personally, I don't like it because (my personal opinions):

• It is meant to be used together with the STL
• The organization of classes and namespaces seems chaotic too me
• It is too low-level, complex or overengineered in several places
• Some parts that literally require a Ph.D. to work with should be placed in a separate library

Warning, the library is currently work in progress (pre-alpha stage). It may (and will!) undergo drastic changes of class, function and namespace names and behaviour and overall structure. It is not recommended to use the library now. Nevertheless, the classes in Saf::Collection and Saf::Algo namespaces are generally usable for basic tasks.

At the moment, the library is being developed and tested on the following platforms:

• Visual Studio 2010 on Microsoft Windows (both x86 and x86-64)
• GCC 4.6 on Linux (both x86 and x86-64)

Coming soon...

Ondrej Danek

• web: www.ondrej-danek.net
• mail: ondrej.danek@gmail.com

The library is distributed under the GNU General Public License v 3.0.

• Documentation (generated by Doxygen from the sources, occassionaly refreshed)
• Sources can be obtained from or browsed at the project's SourceForge page