Libraries.rst

Libraries

Contents

• Summary
• General
• Specific Recommendations
  • Regex
  • String Algorithms (chop, ends_with etc)

Summary

This page describes the preferred libraries used with the Mantid code base.

General

• Use libraries from std where possible.
• Boost header-only libraries are also always available. The following compiled Boost libraries are available:
  • regex
  • date_time
  • python
  • serialization
  • others required must be discussed with the TSC
• Eigen is used for fast linear algebra calculations
• Poco is also used for:
  • asynchronous method support
  • application configuration
  • logging
  • path handling (will eventually be replaced by std::filesystem)
  • networking
  • XML parsing

Specific Recommendations

Regex

Prefer boost::regex over std::regex (bugs in std::regex until gcc 5 and some platforms still use gcc 4.8)

String Algorithms (chop, ends_with etc)

• Prefer Boost algorithms if possible
• Some string utilities also exist in MantidKernel/Strings.h