I think it would work pretty well, but also agree there's a chance for
people to screw it up. This is especially true of Joe gradstudent who
may not know the rule and may not look in the header file and would just
end up with mysterious memory corruption problems when they did
something that seemed right from looking at an isolated part of the
source. I think this may not be viable since we have to keep in mind a
lot of non-experts will end up changing this code, and it shouldn't be
easy for them to innocently shoot themselves in the foot.
Gabe
nathan binkert wrote:
> I want to point something out to all developers that use M5 that was
> prompted by a recent diff that I reviewed for Gabe. If people find
> this worthwhile, I can stick this into comments in the file. Also, if
> this could use some clarification, please let me know.
>
> After you read what's below, think about this: should was start doing
> something more along these lines?
> typedef RefCountingPtr<Foo> FooPtrRef;
> typedef Foo *FooPtr;
>
> And ask people to use FooPtrRef in containers and FooPtr for function
> arguments? The danger of this is that people could screw up. The
> benefit is that forward declarations are easier.
>
> Nate
>
> --------------
>
> When using reference counting (from base/ref_cnt.hh), we usually do
> something like this:
>
> class Foo : public RefCounted
> {};
>
> typedef RefCountingPtr<Foo> FooPtr;
>
> We then use FooPtr EVERYWHERE. This isn't strictly necessary. In
> reality, we only need to use FooPtr in places that store pointers.
> i.e. member variables, and containers. It is perfectly reasonable to
> use a "Foo *" when calling a function instead of a FooPtr (and it's a
> little faster to boot). The point is, you have to think of a FooPtr
> as something that holds a reference. When a function is invoked, the
> caller is loaning the function a reference, so a FooPtr is
> unnecessary. The FooPtr is only necessary if the caller wants to keep
> that reference after the function returns. This is perfectly
> reasonable code:
>
> class FooContainer
> {
> FooPtr myFoo;
>
> void
> setFoo(Foo *foo)
> {
> myFoo = foo;
> }
> };
> _______________________________________________
> m5-dev mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/m5-dev
>
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