This is what I want to know. Having come from C to C++, iostreams were a big improvement over the "strings" and print functions of C. I even extended a base iostream class to have a "teebuf" logger, that could output to multiple streams and had the standard logging levels.
It's been a while since I last had mastery of C++, but I'd like to hear what is as portable and better than iostreams.
- <iostream> makes localization more difficult, compared to printf (localizing <iostream> code is beyond awful)
- <iostream> makes thread safety more difficult, compared to printf (it is safe to printf/fprintf from multiple threads, simultaneously, without any extra work)
- The <iostream> operator overloading syntax is bad (my sense is that the operator overloading abuse in <iostream> was a contributing factor for why Java doesn't allow operator overloading)
- Streams in <iostream> are stateful, and it's easy to accidentally leave them in the wrong state (radix, padding, field width, etc)
- Performance of <iostream>, out of the box, is mediocre (to get decent performance, you need to change some defaults)
The main advantage of <iostream> was that it provided type safety, but IMO that advantage has long since been irrelevant. You get type safety with std::printf, with most compilers, assuming you enable -Wformat on GCC or similar options in other compilers.
The only remaining advantage of <iostream> is that you can overload operator<<. I don't think that's much of an advantage, especially weighed against the numerous disadvantages.
Using std::printf is better and more portable. Libfmt is also better and more portable, and it is now part of the standard library as std::format.
https://www.moria.us/articles/iostream-is-hopelessly-broken/
In an obnoxious way. The first code someone will see of a new language is often 'hello world'. In C++, 'hello world' is an advertisement for the fact that operator overloading exists.
it's the coolest part
About 6-7 years ago back when my employer was running code compiled with gcc-4.4.7 and running it on Linux 2.6.32 boxes even though it was pretty old even back then, it took me a lot of convincing the company to give libfmt a try.
It was such a boost to developer happiness. People were literally overjoyed, writing to me on Slack how much of a pleasure string formatting has become.
Have a look at fmtlib. The interface is more like printf, but type safe and format strings are parsed at compile time. I believe it’s what std::format is based on, which could also be an option for you depending on how recent your compiler/language version is.
See, I don't believe that's an improvement. Having used printf in C, I was relieved to be able to "redirect" whatever to a stream, and not care about whether it should be "%d" or "%02f" or even if it was a struct/class.
On top of this, treating files as streams, strings as streams, or even extending streams to make a tee-stream[0] all seem clunkier to me with a printf like system.
Maybe fmt fixes these problems, I don't know. But I feel a lot of people don't like iostreams because they have some form of Stockholm syndrome with printf.
[0] - https://wordaligned.org/articles/cpp-streambufs#tee-streams
Yeah, it looks like you did a lot of guesswork in that comment, and a lot of those guesses were inaccurate. Not really trying to be hostile here, but you did acknowledge that you were unfamiliar with std::format.
The part that fmtlib / std::format has, which is printf-like, is the idea of having a format string and arguments, rather than having a bunch of separate, piecemeal strings.
// Old printf code, works ok for most people
std::printf("failed to clone %s from %s", target, src);
// <iostream>
std::cout << "failed to clone " << target << " from " << src;
// New std::format / fmtlib
std::print("failed to clone {} from {}", target, src);
The std::print interface can work equally well with FILE or std::ofstream, or whatever you want. This is C++, and so you can just use a templated output iterator—or one of the overloads that creates one automatically.
There are a lot of problems with <iostream>. I think it’s telling that lots of languages have copied printf, but nobody (or almost nobody) thought <iostream> was good enough to copy. There are just too many serious design flaws with <iostream>. It would be one thing if <iostream> were just annoying to use, but it poses problems for localization, thread-safety, accidental misuse through its statefulness, and its operator overloading syntax is bad.
FWIW, I have waaaay more experience with iostreams than printf. I once wrote a replacement for most parts of std::ostream purely because I had a logging system that was loosely based on log4cxx (which is based on iostreams) and I needed much faster formatting.
Right now I'm in the process of switching to a different logging system that uses fmtlib. I can say that I really, really do not miss the extreme verbosity of iostreams at all. The statefulness I could take or leave, although on balance I'd say it's usually more of a negative. Thankfully I don't have to give up type safety or extensibility.
As for treating files/strings/whatever as streams--my impression of fmtlib is that it's concerned primarily with formatting, which frankly I'm fine with. It can write to an in-memory buffer or to a FILE* or to a std::ostream, which covers pretty much all of my needs. Given the performance of iostreams (lots of virtual method calls) I never really saw the point of using it as a more generalized 'streaming' interface, even knowing that it's possible.
However, printf and its ilk get it right; presentation is a property of the context in which the entity is to be presented, not of the entity itself. You can kvetch about the markup syntax, or the type safety issues the C implementation has, but the architecture is fundamentally correct.