mstring has its own site starting today, at mstring.fedem.eu — the sixth in the family after cparse, callonce, fson and plugin.
What mstring is
A code generator for the messages of C++ programs and libraries. You write each message once — its typed parameters and its text in every language:
$MODULE errors
$LANGUAGE en
$EXCEPTION INHERITED std::exception
$THROW ENABLE
$MESSAGE ConfigMissing
@ path std::string const &
"configuration file '{$path}' is missing"
[tr]
"yapılandırma dosyası '{$path}' bulunamadı"
and mstring writes the C++:
try
{
ThrowConfigMissing( "/etc/app.conf" );
}
catch ( std::exception const &e )
{
std::cerr << e.what( ) << '\n'; // configuration file '/etc/app.conf' is missing
}
A string function, a streamable class, an exception class and its throw function, a fatal-error function, a syslog function — from the same message, in the language of the locale you give it. ThrowConfigMissing( 42 ) does not compile.
Why a generator
Run-time catalogs (gettext, ICU) look a text up by a key and format untyped arguments. For an application's user interface, translated by a team and updated without a release, that is the right design. For the messages of a library — its errors, its exceptions, its log lines — it is more machinery than the job needs, and a typo in an argument list shows up as a garbled message in production. mstring moves that to compile time.
What is on the site
- a Getting Started guide and six more User Guide pages;
- the message-file language, construct by construct, with a railroad diagram each;
- a Reference Manual of every directive and the exact C++ it generates;
- the command line and the build integration;
- four annotated examples, one of them a real library — plugin's
dsold; - Code View and the downloads of 1.3.0.0.
mstring is MIT-licensed.
