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FastFormat 0.7.1 released

FastFormat is an Open Source C/C++ Output/Formatting library, whose design parameters are 100% type-safety, efficiency, genericity and extensibility. It is simple to use and extend, expressive, flexible, and highly-portable (platform and compiler-independent).

FastFormat supports output/formatting of statements of arbitrary complexity, consisting of heterogeneous types.

FastFormat writes to output "sinks", which can be of arbitrary type. It implicitly supports any type that is structurally conformant with the standard library's string, and the library includes adaptors to allow writing to std::ostream, FILE*, speech (currently Windows-only), STLSoft's auto_buffer, C-style string buffers, and character buffers. Adaptation to a new type merely requires the definition of a single function.

FastFormat is robust. Both APIs are 100% type-safe - something neither IOStreams nor Boost.Format can claim - and with the Write API it is impossible to compile defective code.

FastFormat is fast. The processing of each statement involves at most one memory allocation to hold the entire statement, and each statement element is measured and copied exactly once. As a consequence, the library is on a par with (the type-unsafe) C's Streams (printf()-family) of functions, faster than C++'s IOStreams (by 2-5x) and Loki.SafeFormat (by 1-5x), and considerably faster than Boost.Format (by 5-17x).

FastFormat supports I18N/L10N by using numbered arguments, enabling reordering of arguments by exchanging format strings. The library comes with a number of resource bundles, classes whose instances can load sets of localised resource strings for use as format strings.

FastFormat does not contain any compiler-specific or platform-specific constructs. It supports UNIX (including Linux and Mac OS-X), and Windows, and should work with any operating system. It is known to be compatible with Clang, Comeau (4.3.3+), GCC (3.4+), Intel (8+), Metrowerks (8+), Microsoft Visual C++ (6.0+), and should work with any reasonably modern C++ compiler.

FastFormat is completely free and includes source released under a BSD-style license. Commercial customisations and related consultancy are provided by Synesis Software Pty Ltd; http://synesis.com.au/contact.html\)

FastFormat Training is provided by Synesis Software Pty Ltd; details at http://synesis.com.au/training.html

Release 0.7.1 contains the following changes:
Clang-compatibilityVC++ 11/12/14-compatibility
NOTE: bundles shwild 0.10.1NOTE: bundles xTests 0.18.3
* NOTE: depends on STLSoft 1.9.121 (not bundled)
Download from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/fastformat/files/fastformat/
Discuss at: http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=612781
Donate at: http://sourceforge.net/project/project_donations.php?group_id=177382
FastFormat website: http://fastformat.org/
Note: this release of FastFormat requires STLSoft 1.9.121, or later. Download from http://stlsoft.org/

Extended Radio Silence - ending in Q3 2012

To anyone who's still following any of my public works - FastFormat, Pantheios, STLSoft, Breaking Up The Monolith, Quality Matters, VOLE, etc. - and wondering whether these activities are permanently moribund, I want to let you know that I'll soon be free of a very intense and overwhelmingly consuming commercial engagement over the last 2.5 years, and the second half of this year should see much activity in open-source, commercial, and writing activities.

Cheers

Matt

Wide String Shims for std::exception

The new release of STLSoft supports seamless use of exceptions with FastFormat (and Pantheios) in wide-string builds; described on this post on the STLSoft project blog.

fmt::flush

As discussed in the latest instalment of Quality Matters, having flushing output streams and verifying their status is a pre-requisite of writing a robust program. Doing this with the IOStreams is a somewhat onerous task; see the column for details. Using the new flush() function, introduced in version 0.6.2, makes doing so with FastFormat a breeze, as in:

#include <fastformat/ff.hpp>
#include <fastformat/sinks/ostream.hpp>

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
 ff::flush(ff::writeln(std::cout, "Hello, world!"));

 return 0;
}

FastFormat 0.6.2 released

I've just released version 0.6.2 of FastFormat, containing a number of improvements and several new features, which will be detailed in a series of forthcoming posts on this blog. The new features include the flush() function, whose purpose and behaviour is described in the latest instalment of my Quality Matters column in October's instalment of ACCU's Overload.

FastFormat 0.6.1 (alpha 1) released

I'm currently releasing version 0.6.1 (alpha 1) of FastFormat. Although 0.6 will contain a number of new additions, the first alpha release contains no functional changes. It's entirely about releasing some performance improvements that I've had in the bag for a long time, but keep overlooking.

The reason I'm doing so now is, in part, that there's been a thread on the FastFormat Help Forum concerning one potential user's assertion that FastFormat (and some of the STLSoft components upon which it relies) is not as quick as my previous claims have indicated. Thankfully, it was easy to perform some simple tests and ascertain that, so far, nothing's overtaken it in terms of performance. In one of the tests I added FastFormat (both write() and fmt()) and STLSoft's integer_to_string to an integer-to-string conversion test that included, amongst other things, Boost.Spirit.Karma. I'm pleased to report - with Visual C++ 9, at least (haven't had time to use other compilers yet) - that FastFormat holds its own, and with the new optimisations in 0.6 it is the fastest of the possible format components, including ~10% faster than Karma.

The only thing faster is the low-level stlsoft::integer_to_string() function that FastFormat uses internally, which is a good 30-40% faster than the rest. (Not that I'd advocate using it in application code, of course, since it's not so expressive, and requires pointer and buffer-length parameters.)

I owe thanks to the OP for causing me to look again and confirm FastFormat's performance advantages, and to release the long-awaited optimisations.