Re: [eigen] Std Vector again

[Rene Wagner <rw@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2009-06-26 at 14:55 +0200, Benoit Jacob wrote:
> Whence the StdVector header. In Eigen 2.0.3, it
> takes care of specifying the allocator for you. (Not in the
> development branch though).

Pardon my ignorance, I haven't been able to follow the mailing list as
closely as I would have liked to recently... What's the current state of
affairs in the development branch?

Keir raises a point that is also important to me: Does the current approach 
play nice with templated types that go into a std::vector?

> > Then I tried switching to using the eigen specialization in Eigen/StdVector.
> > That ended up being worse, because suddenly my header files had to be
> > included in a certain order, or there would be mysterious runtime breakage.
> 
> The only requirement should be: include <Eigen/StdVector> before
> including <vector>. Actually, <Eigen/StdVector> takes care of
> including <vector> for you. all you have to do is replace <vector> by
> <Eigen/StdVector>.

I'm afraid it's not that simple. First of all, as a library author, I
don't have control over how users of my code include my headers.

Secondly, even if you could somehow ensure that <Eigen/StdVector> is
always included first code that declares std::vector in an STL
compatible way still triggers errors like the following:


In file included from /usr/include/boost/functional/hash/hash.hpp:16,
                 from /usr/include/boost/functional/hash.hpp:10,
                 from /usr/include/boost/asio/detail/hash_map.hpp:24,

from /usr/include/boost/asio/detail/epoll_reactor.hpp:37,
                 from /usr/include/boost/asio/impl/io_service.ipp:25,
                 from /usr/include/boost/asio/io_service.hpp:550,
                 from /usr/include/boost/asio/basic_io_object.hpp:20,
                 from /usr/include/boost/asio/basic_socket.hpp:24,

from /usr/include/boost/asio/basic_datagram_socket.hpp:25,
                 from /usr/include/boost/asio.hpp:20,

                 /usr/include/boost/detail/container_fwd.hpp:80: error:
redeclared with 2 template parameter(s)
/usr/include/eigen2/Eigen/StdVector:88: note: previous declaration
‘template<class T, class AllocT, bool HasAlignedNew> class std::vector’
used 3 template parameter(s)

The offending code is:

// ...

// gcc 3.4 and greater
namespace std
{
// ...
    template <class T, class Allocator> class vector;
// ...
} 

> This flaw is being addressed in C++0x by the way.

Let's be realistic here. It's clearly going to be C++1x, and it will
probably take another few years until implementations are ready for
prime time.

> > What about having an Eigen::vector<> class?

I'd like to second that request. Having a standard (as in "standard for
code that uses eigen2") vector replacement which uses std::vector
internally but doesn't require any workarounds would be a huge
improvement over the current situation IMO.

On a related note, EIGEN_DONT_VECTORIZE didn't work for me with 2.0.1
but appears to work with 2.0.3 (although I can't be sure that isn't due
to other changes in my code).

Cheers,

Rene