In my opinion, many C++ projects would be simpler, cheaper, safer, and better maintained, if were written in C (with adequate libraries, e.g. for strings, vectors, maps, threads, timers, sockets, etc.).
How do you handle types which need to free memory without destructors? Manually loop over the vector and free stuff every time one goes out of scope? That doesn't seem safer to me.
Separate libraries, without "macro hell".
>>How do you handle types which need to free memory without destructors? Manually loop over the vector and free stuff every time one goes out of scope? That doesn't seem safer to me.
Providing both heap and stack based allocation. E.g. allocating a vector in the stack would require no explicit de-allocation (example: https://github.com/faragon/libsrt). For heap allocation, you would need to call some sometype_free(&a) function, obviously (there is no RAII in C).
i find '__attribute__((cleanup (fn)))' fascinating in C, need to try it in some production code though.
You're library does look nice for what it does, and may have to look into it for some projects (I do have some C projects). Thanks!
For maps I've implemented integer, pointers, and strings, without code bloat (tree implementation is common, without macro-templates). I'm planning adding some generic type support for fixed-size elements, while keeping internal tree pointer-less and both stack and heap allocation possible, with minimal code bloat/duplication.
http://antirez.com/picol/picol.c.txt
I still enjoy programming in C++ but there is a lot of truth in the criticism that programs written in C are simpler.
BTW, Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) is a very sharp programmer, able to write programs without redundancy and look easy (which is very difficult to achieve).