Re: [boost] rvalue ref best practices?

Subject: Re: [boost] rvalue ref best practices?
From: Howard Hinnant (howard.hinnant_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-06-09 18:58:49

On Jun 9, 2012, at 6:44 PM, Daniel Larimer wrote:

> In my particular case I am passing 'messages' around and they only ever exist in one place at a time.  I want the compiler to tell me when I try to make a copy.  The effect is the same as using unique_ptr<Message> except that Message has value semantics and there is no 'extra' heap allocation for Message which is essentially a pointer to the real data.  

Perhaps in your particular case a move-only message, or a message with an explicit copy member is a good idea.  You might be willing to sacrifice usability with generic-copy-algorithms for this class to get the benefit of being assured that copies either can't happen or are suitably rare.

But I wouldn't recommend an explicit copy for more general purpose types, because a general purpose type has to be usable in such a wide variety use cases.  Obviously though we do have general purpose move-only types.

Howard