[Ktechlab-devel] =P

[Alan Grimes]

Even though I've been hacking on ktechlab for years, there are many many
features I Just Do Not Use(tm).

For example, the context help. It would appear that there is an
infrastructure for contributing user-generated pages to some
centeralized database that is not active for some reason. That would be
pretty cool.

Also, I realized that in my work on the component library (really all
parts of ktechlab), I had been continuing a bad legacy design decision
to use pointers for everything everywhere, and to manually instantiate
things each time the class was loaded. A much more elegant solution is
to simply make the classes members of the class you are working on.
profiling feedback (had to try out the new valgrind. ;), showed that
there was an issue with demultiplexer, have a look at the new code in
the archives.

One especially tricky concept is the standard template libraries should
not be used to store pointers to objects but rather directly contain the
objects themselves. (a practice violated universally by ktechlab's
current code).

When done correctly, you can go to std::vector and say "I need 20
logic-outs", and it will give you 20 logic-outs. =P You don't,
necessarily, have to loop through, create and add each one. Crazy.

Anyway, look for opportunities to get rid of pointers to things, they're
inherently buggy and take up waaaay too much space on 64 bit
architectures!!!

-- 
New president: Here we go again...
Chemistry.com: A total rip-off.
Powers are not rights.