Who architected / designed C++'s IOStreams, and would it still be considered well-designed by today's standards?
First off, it may seem that I'm asking for subjective opinions, but that's not what I'm after. I'd love to hear some well-grounded arguments on this topic.
In the hope of getting some insight into how a modern streams / serialization framework ought to be designed, I recently got myself a copy of the book Standard C++ IOStreams and Locales by Angelika Langer and Klaus Kreft. I figured that if IOStreams wasn't well-designed, it wouldn't have made it into the C++ standard library in the first place.
After having read various parts of this book, I am starting to have doubts if IOStreams can compare to e.g. the STL from an overall architectural point-of-view. Read e.g. this interview with Alexander Stepanov (the STL's "inventor") to learn about some design decisions that went into the STL.
What surprises me in particular:
It seems to be unknown who was responsible for IOStreams' overall design (I'd love to read some background information about this — does anyone know good resources?);
Once you delve beneath the immediate surface of IOStreams, e.g. if you want to extend IOStreams with your own classes, you get to an interface with fairly cryptic and confusing member function names, e.g.
getloc/imbue,uflow/underflow,snextc/sbumpc/sgetc/sgetn,pbase/pptr/epptr(and there's probably even worse examples). This makes it so much harder to understand the overall design and how the single parts co-operate. Even the book I mentioned above doesn't help that much (IMHO).
Thus my question:
If you had to judge by today's software engineering standards (if there actually is any general agreement on these), would C++'s IOStreams still be considered well-designed? (I wouldn't want to improve my software design skills from something that's generally considered outdated.)
Answer
Regarding who designed them, the original library was (not surprisingly) created by Bjarne Stroustrup, and then reimplemented by Dave Presotto. This was then redesigned and reimplemented yet again by Jerry Schwarz for Cfront 2.0, using the idea of manipulators from Andrew Koenig. The standard version of the library is based on this implementation.
Source "The Design & Evolution of C++", section 8.3.1.