We shouldn't worry about C++11 / C++14 compiler support, which will eventually come, but rather standard libraries. It's a pain that libstdc++ still does not support some C++11 features[1] (no std::move on streams, for example).
They probably have good reasons, such as keeping the same ABI as long as possible, but it's sometimes very frustrating.
The only sore thumb in libstdc++ is the regex library. It doesn't work and the headers exist. There are no warnings while compiling the code too. So, it'll appear like everything is dandy and it blows up at run time and usually developers don't think the fault lies in the library code...
Why? no clue, no reason.
But Clang with libc++? There're reasons.
The primary Clang user groups are Apple and FreeBSD communities. a.k.a. anti-GCC groups. Both of them really want to avoid any GCC stuff and are officially deprecating all the GCC stuff. Having dependency to GCC stuff is nonsense on these platforms. If common developers are sane enough, they' won't use libstdc++.
And other group is the Linux development. But I don't think there're really many developers who are using Clang for production on Linux. There's no big push from the platform, and also no big benefits. But there're many shortcomings for using Clang. It's not installed by default, not supported by platform, not tested much.
If there're some people want to adapt Clang on Linux even now, they won't hesitate to use libc++. And the others will just stays in good old GCC with libstdc++.
I think there are several benefits in using clang tools. You might find useful the Chandler Carruth's talk on Going Native on which he demoed some great tools that doesn't really have alternative on the gnu toolchain.
Clang certainly has its advantages (the faster compile times are very nice), but for a typical user that just wants to compile stuff, there's really nothing huge—and as always they need to balanced against the disadvantages. In general it's often a wash, and you may as well just use whatever comes with your system or whatever your friends use...
For me, the killer is typically optimization: e.g. for a CPU-intensive app I work on, gcc generates a binary that is twice as fast as what clang generates (this has been true for ages and across many compiler versions). I can live with slightly pokey compiles, but having my program take one week to execute instead of two is pretty compelling...
Would you mind submitting a bug report (with a reproduction case, if you're able) to the Clang team or mailing list? IIRC, they have an automated test suite for performance and regression testing; I'm sure they would greatly appreciate you taking the time to submit a test case where clang is producing egregiously slow binaries.
I could try, but although the difference seems localized to a fairly small number of functions, I haven't been able to precisely identify why it's so slow (there's no single inner loop etc that's slow), and shrinking it to something minimal would be hard...
Oh! before doing C++14 gcc should please fix the std::list class; the size() method walks over the whole list in order to determine its size, outrageous.
I think everyone will agree that using 4 bytes to store the size a much better idea than potentially enumerating millions of nodes just to count them, in the process completely blowing the cache and any optimizations the processors may do.
It's four goddamn bytes. Or eight if you really want more than 4 billion elements.
Most STL implementations have always done this. This is one reason why it's better to use the empty() check for an empty container instead of size() == 0 for all container types.
Also, linked lists are notoriously crap for cache coherency / processor pre-fetching and branch prediction by processors anyway, given that there's no guarantee where each node will be allocated - the only way to do that is pull them off a slab allocator or something, in which case you might as well use a vector or deque anyway...
That may make 'splice' slower. See http://home.roadrunner.com/~hinnant/On_list_size.html (I think that could be solved by having list iterators carry a field pointing to their container, but haven't given it much thought. Corrections welcome)
Having list iterators carry a field pointing to their container wouldn't help you determine the number of objects between two iterators when you splice, which is what you need in order to maintain the object count.
Storing an index in the iterator would not be a solution either. That would mean updating the index in all the existing iterators when you insert an object in the list.
Just make it the native size based on architecture. 4-byte int for 32-bit, 8-byte for 64-bit. It's impossible to store more than 4 billion elements on a 32-bit machine, you run out of memory first.
That's new in C++11 though, isn't it? I'm pretty sure (i.e. I haven't checked the spec) that as far as C++03 the complexity was allowed to be linear. Honestly my sense of aesthetics agrees -- linked lists aren't supposed to have constant-time operations, there are better choices if that is a requirement. And if you want an augmented data structure you should cook your own: a list with extra tracking (i.e. ever node needs to have a pointer to the global thingy!) and insertion hooks isn't a "list" any more.
Yeah, they changed the wording from "should" to "must" be O(1) in C++11, which means that before, even when they encourage the implementer to do it constant, that was in fact optional.
I don't that tracking the size would be a big deal, if you think that doing that they wouldn't be a linked list any more, you could think it as a linked link wrapper.
In any case the complexity guarantees of all the other operations remain true so I don't think it is a big deal.
That's why i like C; you never bitch about such things, you just do your own list;
In C++ you are supposed to reuse standard abstractions; So you can
- do your own std::list; (still have to copy iterators and everything into it;-)
- do your own wrapper around std::list that exposes a weaker interface,
- make your own list and everybody start to bitch that you are reinventing the wheel.
As you know in C++ you can do things the C++ way or the C way. That's why I like C++. If you want O(1) for size() of a collection you can use std::vector<> Of course, it doesn't suit every situation.
Unfortunately libc++ is fully supported on Mac OSX only, with ports on their way. I actually use libc++ on linux but there're still some things that need to be fixed. [1]
yeah right. It is beta-quality unfit for pre-packaging in distro's. ABI incompatible with libstdcxx and deliberately OS X only. (It works sure (i mean kinda) no one is actually a linux port developer or maintainer not yet)
They probably have good reasons, such as keeping the same ABI as long as possible, but it's sometimes very frustrating.
[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/status.html#s...