Re: [boost] Formal Review: Variant Library

From: Anthony Williams (anthony.williamsNOSPAM_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-02-18 09:39:17

Jeff Garland writes:
 > Today is the start of the formal review of the Variant library
 > by Eric Friedman and Itay Maman. 

Firstly, I vote to ACCEPT the Variant library into boost, as it fills a real
need. However, I have some comments:

* Nowhere is it documented that using incomplete<T> as a type will result in
  values of type T being stored on the heap, whereas values of other types are
  stored within the variant itself. Though this is an understandable
  restriction (I can't see how else to handle incomplete types), this may be
  an issue, because operator new might be private for class T.

* which() is documented to return "int", when the implementation returns
  "unsigned int".

* extract<T>() is badly named, as it retrieves a reference-to-T, not a T ---
  how about extract_reference<T>()?

Anthony
-- 
Anthony Williams
Senior Software Engineer, Beran Instruments Ltd.
Remove NOSPAM when replying, for timely response.