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

Thu Nov 13 10:59:25 PST 2014

Could we consider moving the things you listed to shared pointer semantics ? It will be a simple and clear model; unless someone justifies that it will be a performance concern to use shared pointers there I don’t think we need a new and more complex to reason about smart pointer.

> On Nov 13, 2014, at 9:42 AM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Ping - we've hit another of these (propagating Diagnostic::OwnsDiagClient into other places) in
> 
> http://llvm.org/viewvc/llvm-project?view=revision&revision=221884 <http://llvm.org/viewvc/llvm-project?view=revision&revision=221884>
> 
> Any ideas how we should be tackling this overall? I'm not entirely convinced these are fixable by design and I think we might honestly want a conditional-ownership smart pointer... 
> 
> But I'm happy to hold off on that a while longer if we're going to make a concerted effort to avoid propagating these half-baked solutions and actually try to remove them when we come up against problems with/around them.
> 
> On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 1:01 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com <mailto:dblaikie at gmail.com>> wrote:
> & repeating for the benefit of cfe-dev, here's the list of known cases of conditional ownership (I'm sure there are others that don't fit the exact naming convention I grep'd for):
> 
> In Clang, simply grepping for "Owns" comes up with the following boolean members:
> 
> CodeGenAction::OwnsVMContext
> ASTReader::OwnsDeserializationListener
> Diagnostic::OwnsDiagClient
> Preprocessor::OwnsHeaderSearch
> TokenLexer::OwnsTokens
> Action::OwnsInputs (this ones trickier - it's a boolean that indicates whether all the elements of a vector<T*> are owned or unowned)
> ASTUnit::OwnsRemappedFileBuffers
> VerifyDiagnosticConsumer::OwnsPrimaryClient
> TextDiagnosticPrinter::OwnsOutputStream
> FixItRewriter::OwnsClient
> Tooling::OwnsAction
> 
> Some in LLVM:
> 
> circular_raw_ostream::OwnsStream
> Arg::OwnsValues (another tricky one with a bool flag and a vector of raw pointers, if I recall correctly)
> 
> 
> And a couple that I changed {T*, bool} to {T*, unique_ptr<T>}:
> 
> LogDiagnosticPrinter::StreamOwner
> ASTUnit::ComputedPreamble::Owner
> 
> On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 1:00 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com <mailto:dblaikie at gmail.com>> wrote:
> [+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 <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 <mailto:dblaikie at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 2:43 AM, Anton Yartsev <anton.yartsev at gmail.com <mailto: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 <mailto:dblaikie at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 3:14 PM, Anton Yartsev <anton.yartsev at gmail.com <mailto: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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