[cfe-dev] [LLVMdev] New type of smart pointer for LLVM

[David Blaikie]

[+cfe-dev]

This conversation has already been happening on llvm-dev so there's no good
way for me to capture the entire existing discussion (so I'm jumping you in
part-way) & the subject line could be more descriptive, but I wanted to add
Clang developers since many of the interesting cases of conditional
ownership I've seen were in Clang.

I know some of you are also on llvm-dev but not active readers, so it might
be worth using this as a jumping off point to go & find the full llvm-dev
thread, read that and, when replying, add cfe-dev.

If anyone not on llvm-dev wants some more context there's the email archive
here (
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2014-September/thread.html#77136
) and/or I'm happy to provide more context/summary myself.

On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 9:44 AM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 2:43 AM, Anton Yartsev <anton.yartsev at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>  Thanks for the feedback!
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 3:36 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 3:14 PM, Anton Yartsev <anton.yartsev at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>  Ping!
>>>>
>>>> Suggested is a wrapper over a raw pointer that is intended for freeing
>>>> wrapped memory at the end of wrappers lifetime if ownership of a raw
>>>> pointer was not taken away during the lifetime of the wrapper.
>>>> The main difference from unique_ptr is an ability to access the wrapped
>>>> pointer after the ownership is transferred.
>>>> To make the ownership clearer the wrapper is designed for local-scope
>>>> usage only.
>>>>
>>>
>>>  I'm still concerned this isn't the right direction, and that we
>>> instead want a more formal "maybe owning pointer". The specific use case
>>> you've designed for here, in my experience, doesn't seem to come up often
>>> enough to justify a custom ADT - but the more general tool of
>>> sometimes-owning smart pointer seems common enough (& problematic enough)
>>> to warrant a generic data structure (and such a structure would also be
>>> appliable to the TGParser use case where this came up).
>>>
>>   David, could you, please, clarify the concept of the "maybe owning
>> pointer"?
>>
>
> See my reply to Chandler with a list of classes that hold {T*, bool}
> members where the bool indicates whether the T* needs to be deleted or not.
> My original goal here was to provide an API to make those more robust (more
> precisely: to remove the need to call "release()" and allow us to stay in a
> clear(er) owning domain).
>
>
>>
>>
>>
>>> I'd love to hear some more opinions, but maybe we're not going to get
>>> them...
>>>
>>
>> I strongly agree that the example here isn't compelling.
>>
>>  I think it is a very fundamental design problem when there is a need
>> for a pointer value after it has been deallocated...
>>
>> Not deallocated but stored to the long-living storage. I agree, the
>> problem is in design, the suggested wrapper is an intermediate solution, it
>> was just designed to replace the existing ugly fixes.
>>
>>  I even question whether we need a "maybe owning" smart pointer, or
>> whether this is just an indication that the underlying data structure is
>> *wrong*. The idea of "maybe" and "owning" going to gether, in any sense,
>> seems flat out broken to me from a design perspective, and so I'm not
>> enthused about providing abstractions that make it easier to build systems
>> with unclear ownership semantics.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Anton
>>
>>
>
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