PawLIB 1.0 Released
14 June 2017
After two years of development effort, MousePaw Media is proud to announce the first official release of PawLIB!
The release, codenamed "Willow Sapling," brings many exciting features to C++, including the Flex data structures the release name alludes to. FlexArray, FlexQueue, and FlexStack provide high-performance alternatives to the familiar standard-library vector, queue, and stack classes.
Lead Developer Jason C. McDonald is thrilled about this milestone. "PawLIB has been in the works for a long time, but we've finally completed the first version. We wanted to make sure it was polished."
"I'm excited. We're taking an honestly really big step in code, in experimentation in the company," said Nathan Groggett, who led the taskforce responsible for final review and documentation tasks. "We're moving forward, and that feels great."
When asked about the release, Assistant Lead Developer Jarek Thomas reported, "It's a relief to finally get it out. I'm excited that our data structures are actually faster than the standard library."
Aside from the Flex data structures, PawLIB sports a number of new innovations. Goldilocks, the built-in testing and benchmarking framework, is one such example. In addition to allowing tests to be compiled into production code, it includes a comparative benchmarker with extensive statistical data for performance analysis.
PawLIB is obviously an unusual project, as it attempts to outperform implementations which have been in use for years. "Some people may ask, 'why was this done?'" said Jarek Thomas, "but others will say 'this is awesome' and use it."
This first version also includes a feature-rich message output system (IOChannel), an atomic true/false/maybe data type (Trilean), and a general-use implementation of the Pool design pattern.
Bowen Volwiler, who helped write the documentation for the release, observed, "It's really interesting to look at how we can take something that already exists and make improvements no one would think to make, challenging the status quo."
The team is already making plans for the next release, PawLIB 1.1, which will see the addition of the long-awaited Unicode string class, OneString.
PawLIB 1.0.0 "Willow Sapling" can be downloaded from GitHub. Complete documentation is available at docs.mousepawmedia.com/pawlib.