C++ Templates and Concepts vs. Java's Genericity
Michal Revucky

This talk is about generic programming. Modern object-oriented
languages like Java or C++ provide generic programming. Genericity
under C++ is implemented as templates. C++ concepts is an upgrade of
C++ templates. The functional language Haskell provides genericity,
too. Generic programming is mainly used to implement and provide
reusable libraries, but also in other application areas. For example,
genericity can be used when dealing with binary methods. A C++
technique -- Policy Based Programming -- exploits C++ templates.

The main goal is to find out whether generic programming in Java and
C++ allows us to create high quality programs. We want to find out
which programming language provides genericity so that this particular
language allows us to create a program with higher quality than a
program implemented using genericity in the other language.

We compare programs in the mentioned languages. As basis of the
comparison we describe two problems. The first problem is called
PBMJCH and the second AVA. PBMJCH focuses on binary methods and
generic programming. PBMJCH is implemented in Java, C++ and also
Haskell.

The second problem (AVA) is implemented in C++ using Policy Based
Programming. We create an alternative implementation of AVA in
Java. We compare the implementations of AVA to find out whether the
Java or C++ implementation has higher quality.

We learned from this work that there is not much difference between
Java and C++ concerning maintainability. In general, C++ allows us to
create programs which run faster than their equivalent implementations
in Java. The Java implementation of AVA is more portable than its C++
counterpart.