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

[David Blaikie]

On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 2:20 PM, Argyrios Kyrtzidis <akyrtzi at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> On Nov 13, 2014, at 11:25 AM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'd generally prefer conditional ownership over shared ownership if
> possible - it's a narrower contract & I can still think about where the
> single owner is.
>
>
> I’m not so sure. With unique_ptr and shared_ptr you know exactly what is
> the ownership, without needing to know where it came from, it is very clear.
>

Except that won't be true here - in at least some of these cases of
conditional ownership, at the point where we enter into this arrangement we
may not have ownership of the thing at all (it may've been passed down
through several levels of non-owning, then we're calling into an API that
has conditional ownership - or it may be a concrete object (stack or
global) that cannot be shared) - if we used shared_ptr we could lie about
it by creating a shared_ptr with a null deleter, which in some ways
restricts the weirdness to where it's happening, but could be more
confusing to developers rather than less (hey, I had this shared_ptr and
somehow the object was destroyed - how could that ever happen? At least if
it's conditional ownership they'll have a chance to realize that someone
else is failing to live up to their side of the bargain)


> With conditional ownership I will have to hunt around in the codebase and
> find the trail between different code paths for where the pointer came
> from, so that I know who owns it and in what conditions.
>
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