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Hi David,<BR>
<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE>
<PRE>
On Monday 25 May 2009 19:06:38 David García Garzón wrote:
> On Monday 25 May 2009 18:29:40 Dirk Griffioen wrote:
> > - please note: with the use of smartpointers, this whole line becomes
> > obsolete as they and their resources are destructed when the vector is
>
> I know the implications on what we are doing now, we have a clear memory
> management policy, following it is not difficult and spoting the bugs of
> this kind of construction is very straight forward for us. I cannot say the
> same of the use of smart pointers as most of the things happen behind the
> scene.
That said, i am not trying to ban the use of smart pointers. Just that it is
something that must be discussed with calm. I guess that smart pointers would
imply some other kind of policy we should stablish and learn. How to deal
with circular references, where to detach pointers, when and how giving away
references... I see no gain on porting the whole code base to smart pointers.
It is a lot of work that can be used to more useful things for the project.
If you write new code that could be a place to introduce them but also a
requirement for that would be solving crossplatform distribution of the
dependencies (boost).
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<BR>
I would be very interested in learning about and helping to solve the crossplatform issues, as I believe having (parts of) boost would be very beneficial to clam.<BR>
<BR>
Having said that, smartpointers are based on RAII ('resource aquisition is initialization' - <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Acquisition_Is_Initialization)">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Acquisition_Is_Initialization)</A><BR>
<BR>
This is not a policy but a strong guarantee by the language that acquired resources will be freed: I simply cannot make a fault, by definition (which is a nice position to be in :)<BR>
<BR>
Because it is so usefull, Java/C# added the 'using' keyword even in the presence of their garbage collector. <BR>
<BR>
Regarding references/detach etc - these issues have been solved in the boost packages:<BR>
<BR>
the 'old' smartpointer package (in development since 1999)<BR>
<A HREF="http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_39_0/libs/smart_ptr/smart_ptr.htm#Introduction">http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_39_0/libs/smart_ptr/smart_ptr.htm#Introduction</A><BR>
<BR>
and a new one<BR>
<A HREF="http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_39_0/libs/ptr_container/doc/tutorial.html">http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_39_0/libs/ptr_container/doc/tutorial.html</A><BR>
<BR>
where you can do things like:<BR>
<BR>
boost::ptr_vector<animal> vec;
<PRE>
vec.push_back( new animal ); // you add it as pointer ...
vec[0].eat(); // but get a reference back
</PRE>
<BR>
(which looks surprisingly how clam handles memory, but with more safety attached; see the motivation: <A HREF="http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_39_0/libs/ptr_container/doc/ptr_container.html#motivation)">http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_39_0/libs/ptr_container/doc/ptr_container.html#motivation)</A><BR>
<BR>
So if we can add boost as a depency, we might want to consider it for new code ...<BR>
<BR>
Dirk<BR>
<BR>
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