Re: [boost] Review of a safer memory management approach for

Subject: Re: [boost] Review of a safer memory management approach for
From: Fernando Cacciola (fernando.cacciola_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-06-04 15:56:51

Hi Bartlett,

>
> High warning levels (i.e. with GCC) catch most such mistakes that the
> language proper allows to go through.
>

Right. I actually wasn't even actually writting code (so no compilation).
I was just sketching up an excercise were I intended to show a case of
hidding of a virtual, but forgot the change the signature! And this was
caught by a reviewer.

> BTW, are you gravitating to stack-based programming

I'm not sure if you are calling stack-based what we called value-semantics by 
mistake, or are you effectively considering automatic storage.

I'm gravitating to value-semantics. Then even dynamically-allocated objects by 
usage of handle/body idioms.

But let's say that you are just misusing the term stack.

> because of the memory
> management problems or because of problems of change propagation of shared
> mutable objects?

The latter.

Honestly. I'm at a total lost about what problem are you trying to solve that 
requires such a big framework. I never needed anything beyond shared_ptr (ok 
well, perhaps a *couple* of weak_ptrs), and I'm very well aware of its 
limitations (like circular references). Is just that my designs naturally don't 
do any of that, for reason totally unrelated to memory managment or that fact 
that I happen to use simple reference counting. So that's a non-existent problem 
for me.

> These are almost 100% unrelated issues in my opinion.

Indeed.

>
> Is the C++ boost community really ready to throw away OO programming?

I can't speak for the boost community, but I don't think anyone is doing that.

There are many forms of OO, and idioms within.

What I am particularly ready to throw away is the excess weight in an object 
graph, which IMO isn't a treat of OOD&A itself but just a property of a 
particular design. And one such way to cut the excess is to rely less on shared 
objects and dynamic-polymorphism which in C++ just happens to be based on a 
structural coupling between classes (unlike the case of other OO languages)

-- 
Fernando Cacciola
SciSoft Consulting, Founder
http://www.scisoft-consulting.com