Re: [boost] [Booster] Or boost is useless for library developers

Subject: Re: [boost] [Booster] Or boost is useless for library developers
From: Artyom (artyomtnk_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-05-18 10:55:31

> 
> You don't need the mutex. Look at the recent
> sp_counted_base_spin.hpp.
> 

I just preferred to fail to general mutex when atomic ops are missing.
In any case it looks like this happens only on Linux-non-x86 platforms
and on Linux mutex is already userspace operation (thanks to futexes)

I did this mostly for simplistically hopefully that no-implementations
would use mutex finaly.

> 
> No need to use atomic_set in the constructor. If your
> constructor races with another member, atomics won't save
> you.

I know. It was just for simplicity. Not much hard.

> With all due respect, may I submit that the reason it was
> so easy to make shared_ptr ABI-stable was that it was
> designed with this in mind?

Yes indeed :-) it felt this.

Just boost-version is not provide this ABI stability.

> 
> shared_ptr was frequently criticised for having too much
> overhead and being too slow, and it was an intentional
> design decision to allow add_ref/release to be inlined. I
> knew that on most relevant architectures this didn't provide
> any significant performance benefit 

This is fully reasonable because in reality calls are much cheaper then
any atomic operation. 

> (even making them
> virtual is affordable - and this is another interesting
> tradeoff, allowing ABI-incompatible shared_ptr instances to
> coexist), 

That is really interesting. It would indeed solve the ABI issues
even without creating separate library. Thus each library would
use the shared_ptr ABI created by the original object creator.

> but C++ programmers are notoriously picky.

Or... Have too many prejudices like virtual functions are heavy
or inlining solves every possible performance problem that is
not true.

> Besides, Boost was entirely header-only at the time
> shared_ptr was first designed and implemented, and had no
> build system.

I think that for boost as-is today it is more then fine to have
header only shared_ptr

> 
> In any event, the ABI-stable shared_ptr is spelled
> std::shared_ptr.

Amen!!!

If most of compilers I want to support had C++0x library I would
not have to use 80% of boost I use today.

Artyom.
P.S.: Thanks for looking to my code.