The Best Library.
best is an "STL replacement" for C++20, in the spirit of projects like Abseil
and Folly. However, unlike those, it aims to completely replace the C++
standard library and some of the language's own primitives.
The goal is not interop, nor backwards compatibility: it is total replacement of
40 years of tech debt. best is what you use if you must use C++, but really
hate the STL. Of course, you can use best alongside the standard library, and
best depends on it for many things. But best encourages you to use its
vocabulary types.
We will only support "reasonable" configurations: modern architectures, and
operating systems whose names are "Linux", "Darwin", and "WindowsNT". best
will be free-standing friendly where that is feasible.
best is not exception-friendly. Exceptions introduce performance
pessimizations and safe exception-safe code in C++ is difficult to write and
test. It will always require C++20 as a minimum, and will only ever support
recent Clang and GCC; if you need to build for windows, use clang-cl.
best's design philosophy is to copy Rust where it makes sense and to apply
lessons learned from Abseil. Neither of these is obviously better, so we pick
the best designs from each.
This is the best library in spite of C++, not because of it.
best currently only supports building with Bazel 7. It bundles scripts under
bazel/ for running Bazel via Bazelisk.
best will only have one source-of-truth build system. If you want to use
best with CMake or a similar build system, you are on your own.
best's code is organized into shallow subdirectories that capture different
pieces of functionality.
best/base- Low-level portability utilities.best/container- Container types. We interpret any generic "wrapper" type as a container.best/log- Logging utilities.best/math- Numeric and integer utilities.best/meta- Metaprogramming utilities.best/memory- Low-level memory management.best/string- Text processing utilities.bestis a Unicode-first library.best/test- A unit testing framework.
Bugfixes welcome, but this library is still under construction.
The C++ code mostly follows Google's style guide, with a few changes:
- The names of types and functions are in
snake_case, following the STL. - Non-template constants, and tests, are
PascalCaserather thankConst; all other variables aresnake_case. - Type parameters are
PascalCase. - Documentation comments are Rust style. Header comments follow the include list. The first line of a documentation is the name of the thing being documented. All public APIs must have a doc comment.
best is licensed Apache-2.0.