History

The original idea was to develop a powerful software backbone which would speed the development of new cheminformatics algorithms, with the intention to have full in-house cheminformatics capabilities in general, with the focus on generating QSAR models and finding novel bioisosters.

Commercial options were available at the time, but were discarded due to their price range and license limitations, and to the lack of clean programming interface. Many commercial software have license models that restrict the integration of their code into in-house projects.
Open-source options were also discarded because of their uncertain future and lack of clean programming interface. Also, none of them used the language wanted: C++.

Companies that provide software with similar functionalities that of CDL are:

• Daylight
• Openeye Scientific Software

The C++ programming language was selected because it supports features that were priority in the design of the library:

• Use of Generic and Generative programming:
  • Templates, partial template specialization.
• Have tight control of memory management, memory optimization:
  • Allocators.
• Support of polymorphism.
• Standard library provided clean data structures and algorithms.