• Matt Wilson (20/20) Jan 21 2011 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, 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 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 (alpha 3) contains the following changes:
 * added to_sink(FILE*), which allows standard C streams (stdout, stderr) to be
passed as sinks to FF fmt/write functions, regardless of how they are defined
by the C standard library implementation
 * fastformat::properties_bundle now compatible with STLSoft 1.10's
properties_file class; still defaults to previous, less-flexible, manual
properties parsing if STLSoft 1.10 not being used
 * corrected makefile defect whereby WindowsLargeIntegers example object files
go into BIN directory
 * amended format cache memory allocation to hide MSVCRT memory leak false
positives
 * added test of ignore_missing_arguments_scope (added to 0.3 in 2009, but not
forward merged)


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