Re: [boost] Interest in non-intrusive signal/slot lib?

Subject: Re: [boost] Interest in non-intrusive signal/slot lib?
From: Emil Dotchevski (emildotchevski_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-05-16 14:20:20

On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 7:09 AM, Edward Diener <eldiener_at_[hidden]>
wrote:

> On 5/11/2015 10:25 PM, Emil Dotchevski wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I realize that Boost has Signals library already, but I've implemented a
>> non-intrusive one which approaches the problem differently, and I'm pretty
>> sure that there is no overlap between the two. It turned out more generic
>> than I originally anticipated, so I thought I'd ask if others would find
>> it
>> useful as well.
>>
>> Specifically I was motivated by wanting to use Qt without MOCing. I asked
>> the Qt community if that was possible which generated several rather
>> annoyed negative responses. :) The issue is that while in Qt it's possible
>> to use any function as a Slot, to define a new Qt signal for an existing
>> Qt
>> type one needs to derive from the Qt type, define the signal (as a member
>> function) and do the MOC dance -- which I wanted to avoid.
>>
>> The result is a small, non-intrusive signals/slots library that allows
>> objects of any type to be used as signal emitters, e.g. one of the
>> included
>> examples shows how signals can be emitted by a Windows HWND object.
>>
>> Documentation and source code released under the Boost license can be
>> found
>> here: http://www.revergestudios.com/boost-synapse/.
>>
>
> The documentation says that a signal emitter is a void pointer. Doesn't it
> need to be a shared_ptr<void> instead, since it must be passed to emit as a
> weak_pointer ? You might clarify this in the documentation. Instead of:
>

emit<> takes a void pointer, emit_weak<> takes a weak pointer. I have
updated the documentation, I believe the new introduction and the simple
example it presents are much more understandable now, thanks to the initial
feedback I'm getting.

> I assume that the purpose of having the signal type be a pointer to a
> function taking some data and returning an incomplete type instead of
> returning void is to make each signal type unique. But is this really
> necessary ?

It is necessary so that if you have:

typedef struct button_down_(*button_down)(int x, int y);

you can tell it apart from

typedef struct button_up_(*button_up)(int x, int y);

-- 
Emil Dotchevski
Reverge Studios, Inc.
http://www.revergestudios.com/reblog/index.php?n=ReCode