eigen/doc/D01_StlContainers.dox
Gael Guennebaud 44a527dfa5 * classify and sort the doxygen "related pages"
by tweaking the filename and adding 2 categories:
   Troubleshooting and Advanced
* use the EXCLUDE_SYMBOLS to clean the class list
  (insteaded of a homemade bash script)
* remove the broken "exemple list"
* re-structure the unsupported directory as mentionned in the ML and
  integrate the doc as follow:
  - snippets of the unsupported directory are directly imported from the
    main snippets/CMakefile.txt (no need to duplicate code)
  - add a top level "Unsupported modules" group
  - unsupported modules have to defined their own sub group and nest it
    using \ingroup Unsupported_modules
  - then a pair of //@{ //@} will put everything in the submodule
  - this is just a proposal !
2009-02-04 09:44:44 +00:00

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namespace Eigen {
/** \page StlContainers Troubleshooting - Using STL Containers with Eigen
\b Table \b of \b contents
- \ref summary
- \ref allocator
- \ref vector
\section summary Executive summary
Using STL containers on \ref FixedSizeVectorizable "fixed-size vectorizable Eigen types" requires taking the following two steps:
\li A 16-byte-aligned allocator must be used. Eigen does provide one ready for use: aligned_allocator.
\li If you want to use the std::vector container, you need to \#include <Eigen/StdVector>.
These issues arise only with \ref FixedSizeVectorizable "fixed-size vectorizable Eigen types". For other Eigen types, such as Vector3f or MatrixXd, no special care is needed when using STL containers.
\section allocator Using an aligned allocator
STL containers take an optional template parameter, the allocator type. When using STL containers on \ref FixedSizeVectorizable "fixed-size vectorizable Eigen types", you need tell the container to use an allocator that will always allocate memory at 16-byte-aligned locations. Fortunately, Eigen does provide such an allocator: Eigen::aligned_allocator.
For example, instead of
\code
std::map<int, Eigen::Vector4f>
\endcode
you need to use
\code
std::map<int, Eigen::Vector4f, std::less<int>, Eigen::aligned_allocator<Eigen::Vector4f> >
\endcode
Note that here, the 3rd parameter "std::less<int>" is just the default value, we only had to specify it because we needed to specify the allocator type, that is the 4th parameter.
\section vector The case of std::vector
The situation with std::vector was even worse (explanation below) so we had to specialize it for Eigen types. The upside is that our specialization takes care of specifying the aligned allocator, so you don't need to worry about it. All you need to do is to \#include <Eigen/StdVector>.
So as soon as you have
\code
#include<Eigen/StdVector>
\endcode
you can simply use
\code
std::vector<Eigen::Vector4f>
\endcode
without having to worry about anything.
<span class="note">\b Explanation: The resize() method of std::vector takes a value_type argument (defaulting to value_type()). So with std::vector<Eigen::Vector4f>, some Eigen::Vector4f objects will be passed by value, which discards any alignment modifiers, so a Eigen::Vector4f can be created at an unaligned location. In order to avoid that, the only solution we saw was to specialize std::vector to make it work on a slight modification of, here, Eigen::Vector4f, that is able to deal properly with this situation.
</span>
*/
}