This page gives some links to related work. You can find other references in Metagene paper.

C++ meta-programming libraries

• MPL

MPL (A. Gurtovoy) is a C++ template meta-programming frame-work of compile-time algorithms, part of the Boost package. This library provides common compile-time operations such as tests and sequences manipulation, and some simple compile-time types. The code generated by Metagene is very close to the code written when using MPL.

• Boost libraries

Boost also includes two other libraries dedicated to template meta-programming: static assert (compile-time assertions) and type traits (types properties Maddock and al.). These libraries could be usefull when programming with Metagene.

Expression Templates

• Original technique

The Expression Templates technique (Veldhuizen 1995) has a central place in C++ meta-programming. This technique allows to build compile-time abstract syntax trees, what is useful in many C++ meta-programs. This technique is generally used to transform C++ statements into equivalent (but more efficient) statements. Its implementation in C++ is essentially based on operators overloading and template classes techniques. Unfortunately, this technique suffers from its perceived complexity.

• PETE

To solve this problem, the PETE project (Crotinger et al.) generates all the necessary C++ code for using a particular case of Expression Templates. PETE is highly specialized in this technique, and offers only a few general C++ meta-programming tools. Expression Templates and tools such as PETE can be used to build input data to Metagene programs.

Libraries using C++ meta-programming

• POOMA and Blitz++

C++ template meta-programming is now at the heart of highly efficient (Haney and Crotinger) scientific container libraries like POOMA (Crotinger et al.) - Parallel Object-Oriented Methods and Applications - and Blitz++ (Veldhuizen and al.).

• Functional programming in C++

• • FACT! library (Striegnitz and Smith), built on top of PETE, provides typical functional features such as currying, lambda expressions and lazy evaluation in C++.

• • The Boost Lambda Library (J. Jarvi), included in the Boost package is specialized in lambda expressions.

• • FC++ (McNamara^? and Smaragdakis) is a similar library inspired by the Haskell language.

• Other libraries using C++ meta-programming

Some other libraries are based on C++ meta-programming such as Spirit (The Spirit group), which uses Expression Templates for building parsers. Most of these quoted libraries could have been written using Metagene.

Previous work

C++ meta-programming can be used for manipulation of compile-time abstract trees. Using such techniques, we showed in a previous work (Maes 2003) how to transform fully featured programs written in Tiger (Appel 1997) into effective C++ code. This work was an extension of usual Expression Templates, and required a large quantity of hard-to-maintain C++ template meta-code.

MetaGeneZone

• Metagene, Metagene main page.
• Introduction, An introduction to the Metagene project.
• History: preliminary examples, Some examples showing the equivalence between C++ meta-programming and functionnal programming.
• History: generation paradigm, The generation paradigm and its history.
• Metagene translation process, From functionnal expressions to class templates.
• Related work, Some related work.
• Download Metagene, Download the latest release of Metagene.
• Paper and Slides, A paper introduicing the Metagene project with corresponding slides.
• Possible extensions, Possible extensions to Metagene.
• Horror Show, The museum of C++ horrors.

-- FrancisMaes^? - 19 Nov 2003
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