[vtk-developers] Removing the vtkstd headers from VTK master - using STL directly

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 4:15 PM, David Gobbi <david.gobbi at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 2:11 PM, Sean McBride <sean at rogue-research.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:49:12 -0500, Marcus D. Hanwell said:
>>
>> >I just pushed a topic to reviewtest that removes vtkstd from VTK. For
>> >testing purposes I removed the generation of vtkstd altogether, but
>> >that could be modified.
>> >
>> >http://reviewtest.source.kitware.com:81/#/t/31/
>> >
>> >This seems to compile for me, and was done largely using a Python
>> >script and a little regex. Are there objections to me merging this
>> >topic in? Should the vtkstd headers be generated for legacy purposes,
>> >I know at least ParaView (which I can fix) is using vtkstd in some
>> >places.
>>
>> "vtkstd::" appears 105 times in our code.  Personally, I'm happy to change
>> them all when we upgrade VTK, but it might be helpful, as Bill argues, to
>> have some compatibility route.
>>
>> Was the motivation for this change just cleaning up old cruft?

They have not been needed for quite some time, since we do not support
compilers lacking an STL implementation any longer. I am cleaning up
some of the old cruft that has built up, but will keep the option
around for a version or so for those who need to make changes in their
code.
>>
> I'll just add... if we do go with compatibility, then the "vtkstd::string"
> lines in vtkWrapPython.c and vtkParseExtras.c must remain as-is, i.e. no
> modifications should be done to either file.
>
Good point, so I will be leaving the headers there, but if you turn on
the CMake variable VTK_LEGACY_REMOVE they will never be generated.
They will go away for good in VTK 6. I will add code to remove this
with the VTK legacy remove macro in the same way as the namespace
then.

Thanks for the feedback David.

Marcus