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

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 5:21 PM, Marcus D. Hanwell
<marcus.hanwell at kitware.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 4:21 PM, Marcus D. Hanwell
> <marcus.hanwell at kitware.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>>
> I pushed an update to the topic, using the deprecation mechanism I
> mentioned and the fixes to the wrappers. I would appreciate feedback,
> turning on VTK_LEGACY_REMOVE will cause these things to disappear from
> a new tree, and to not get compiled into the wrapper generators etc.
>
I confirmed that things like ParaView continue to compile unmodified
without VTK_LEGACY_REMOVE on. This topic is now merged, and I will
monitor the dashboards. vtkstd_bool is used in far fewer places, but I
intend to remove that in a similar fashion soon.

Thanks for the feedback, please let me know if you spot any issues.

Thanks,

Marcus