• Matt Wilson (19/19) Dec 27 2008 FastFormat is an Open Source C/C++ Output/Formatting library, whose desi...

Matt Wilson <matthewwilson acm.org> writes:

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, highly-portable (platform and
compiler-independent) and, best of all, it upholds the C tradition of you only
pay for what you use.

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 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, and considerably faster than Boost.Format. Comprehensive
performance analyses are underway: initial results of a realistic scenario on
Windows (32-bit) with Visual C++ 9 shows FastFormat is approximately 3 x faster
than C's Streams, 6 x faster than C++'s IOStreams, and 17 x faster than
Boost.Format.

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 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)

Release 0.2.1 beta 6 contains the following changes:
 * added Loki.SafeFormat to other libraries against which performance tests are
carried out; the results are just as positive for FastFormat as with the other
comparison formatting libraries
 * enhanced performance tests to output in spreadsheet-ready format at
verbosity level 2
 * enhanced auto-generated application layer components to facilitate use with
older compilers that do not support the filter_type mechanism
 * enhanced no-namespace compatibility for older compilers that have some
trouble with ADL
 * added "void pointers" and "no namespace" examples to makefiles
 * fixed minor integral type inconsistencies in CComBSTR sink and void pointers
conversion shims
 * NOTE: depends on STLSoft 1.9.64


Download from: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=177382&package_id=204396

Discuss at: http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=612781

FastFormat website: http://fastformat.org/

Note: this release of FastFormat requires STLSoft 1.9.64, or later. Download
from http://stlsoft.org/