On Dec 3, 2:00 pm, Dave Bailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Dec 2, 10:49 pm, Kenton Varda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > C++ compatibility matters because eventually we want to be able to generate
> > Python code which just wraps C++ code for efficiency. C++ isn't garbage
> > collected, so append() can't easily be implemented in this case without
> > having ownership problems. Slice assignment has the same problem.
> > Also note that even pure-python protocol buffers have a sort of "ownership"
> > issue: Sub-messages all contain pointers back to their parents, so that
> > when a sub-message is modified, the parent's cached size can be marked
> > dirty. (Also, singular sub-messages have to inform their parents when the
> > first field within them is set, but that doesn't apply here.)
>
(Here is my post without all of the ridiculous formatting):
While you're on this topic, I ran into this ownership issue while
implementing the Perl/XS wrapper around the generated C++ code. I
think it is the same issue that would face the author of a Python or
Ruby C++ extension of the generated C++. I ended up having to new() a
copy of every message that I transferred from C++ to Perl or vice
versa. So, for example, a statement like
$team->member($i)->set_first_name('Dave');
won't have the same effect as (C++)
team.mutable_member(i)->set_first_name("Dave");
because $team->member($i) will generate a copy of the underlying C++
object, so that it can be managed by Perl's reference counting without
any concern as to whether or not the underlying C++ object has been
deleted because the containing message went out of scope.
Anyway, I thought it might be possible to allow for shared ownership
of a message object if there were a reference counted variant of
RepeatedPtrField<T> (something like RepeatedSharedPtrField<T> or
whatever), which would provide incref() and decref() methods such that
Perl and C++ could use the same underlying C++ objects in the
generated code. This would really help the performance of the Perl/XS
code if all of that copy construction could be avoided somehow. The C+
+ code generator would need an option that would instruct it to
generate RepeatedSharedPtrField<T> members (and incref and decref
calls, where appropriate) for repeated messages (instead of using the
default RepeatedPtrField<T>).
What do you think? Is something like this possible, even though it
would require a change to protobuf? It is an issue for all {Python,
Perl, Ruby, ...}/C++ extension wrappers for Protocol Buffers. I have
found that protobuf is a faster Perl data serialization mechanism that
the (generic) Storable module, but I think it can be even faster.
-dave
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