Make STL dependencies optional

[sesceu]

We're using flatbuffers in an embedded, real-time C++ environment and it's working great. Thank for for this great lib.

We'd like to extend usage into safety critical systems, however some compilers there, like the Arm Compiler for Embedded FuSa doesn't provide a safety certified STL.

It would be nice to have the option (at least for the runtime part of flatbuffers) to disable the STL usage, i.e. via introducing a NO_STL flag.

[dbaileychess]

Just following up on this. This is for reading a flatbuffer binary, not the generation of flatbuffer binaries? I think if we just support reading, it should be doable, the generation is a bit more work to support.

[mikkelfj]

Otherwise you could use the C bindings, but that would require a rewrite of the interfacing user code.

[dbaileychess]

Yes @mikkelfj I had suggested this independently but I couldn't state if the C bindings would be 100% compatible with those generated by flatc.

[mikkelfj]

As a maintainer of FlatCC, I am not aware of any binary incompatibilities between C and C++, but obviously it is not compatible at the source code level. There are some minor differences in the flatc vs flatcc schema compiler in that certain attributes specific to other languages as well as some deeply recursive schemas across multiple included files might not be supported in FlatCC. (EDIT: and FlatCC is routinely used by C++ projects that cannot work with flatc's C++ requirements).

[Forchapeatl]

Hello everyone . Please is this where we are to include the flags https://github.com/google/flatbuffers/blob/6f895f54c25aa19f5d84ac6cf7fa8bc955a14e1d/tests/swift/tests/SwiftTest.sh#L19

like this

--no_stl

[dbaileychess]

@Forchapeatl We haven't implemented it yet.

[dbaileychess]

What we should do first is better separate the includes into the runtime components and the building components. That way we can better reduce the scope of such a change.

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