[cfe-commits] [patch] TransformIterator (motivating use case in Clang)

[David Blaikie]

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 3:07 PM, Chandler Carruth <chandlerc at google.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 3:33 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > This seems like a lot of work and a disruptive change in API patterning,
>> > and
>> > I'm really not clear what problem it's trying to solve. My suspicion is
>> > that
>> > there isn't one other than a preference for references instead of
>> > pointers.
>>
>> Well the underlying problem was the inconsistency of the iterators in
>> Decl/DeclBase. I wanted to rationalize their value/reference/pointer
>> types so I could then extract the common filtering functionality out
>> of filtered/specific_decl_iterator as a proof-of-concept for a general
>> adapting/filtering iterator device which I could then re-use in my
>> efforts to improve the CFG fidelity and -Wunreachable-code diagnostic.
>> This particular path (generalizing the existing filtering iterators to
>> a reusable adapter before reusing that in the new use case) was
>> suggested by Ted Kremmenek & I was happy enough to have an excuse to
>> tidy up some existing code.
>
>
> Ok, but again, this is a disruptive change in API patterning. I don't think
> the inconsistency you point out really justifies the churn without some more
> compelling problem that it solves. That said, I'd be interested in Ted's
> perspective here.

To be clear - I don't think Ted has a dog in this race (or hasn't
expressed it, at least - though I wouldn't mind having a few more
opinions on the issue since we've all got to work with the code base)
- his involvement was just to say "yeah, we should probably factor out
the common filtering iteration functionality first (before using it
for the CFG)".

> I also don't see why its necessary to change the pointer / reference
> semantics in order to factor out common iterator infrastructure, so I'm not
> really clear why one is blocked on the other.

It's not - I just had to choose one way or the other, and without much
in the way of feedback after a few weeks, it ended up tipping slightly
towards value semantics so I carried along with that. Happy to change
it over if that's the prevailing preference.

- David