• Matt Wilson (22/22) Feb 12 2009 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 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 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 0.3.1 beta 3 contains the following changes:
 * fixed Mac OS-X compilation errors
 * fixed Mac OS-X runtime failures
 * added support for Borland 5.9.x and 6.1.x
 * adjusted discrimination of filter_type mechanism support to allow versions
of Borland from 6.1 or later
 * weakened over-strong pre-condition enforcement in format processing
 * updated some project and solution files for Visual C++ 9
 * other minor fixes and enhancements
 * bundles xTests 0.10.4
 * NOTE: depends on STLSoft 1.9.74


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 1.9.74, or later. Download
from http://stlsoft.org/