Re: [boost] Pimpl Again?

Subject: Re: [boost] Pimpl Again?
From: Rainer Deyke (rainerd_at_[hidden])
Date: 2016-06-08 17:29:13

On 06.06.2016 10:45, Andrzej Krzemienski wrote:
> Hi Vladimir,
> I am following the discussion about Pimpl here, and it seems to me I
> understand the idea less and less.
>
> My impression is (but I might be wrong here) that people use Pimp for
> slightly different things and that one solution might not suit all the
> needs. Let me list two use cases that I consider significantly different:
>
> 1a. I am selling my own complicated library, and I want to make sure users
> will never see the source code. I can afford to add some run-time penalty
> because this is a high-level library and the cost of additional indirection
> is negligible compared to what the library is doing.
>
> 1b. I am a programmer and I use a third party library called LIB1 but I
> wrap it into a class C because I do not want the users of class C to have
> any knowledge of LIB1, because next month I want to replace library LIB1
> with another library LIB2, and I want to do it seamlessly, without forcing
> the users of C to recompile anything. Again, the cost of additional
> indirection is negligible, because what LIB1 and LIB2 do is orders of
> magnitude more expensive.
>
> 2. I want to apply Pimpl to every second class in my program because my
> code is not performance-critical and I would rather have fast compile-times
> than fast run-times. A valid trade-off for non-critical parts of the
> program.
>
> The question is, which of the two (or any other) use cases does your
> library address?

Personally, when I have used pimpl, it has always been for another use 
case entirely:

3. I want a class to have value semantics, but use a copy-on-write 
implementation behind the scenes.  This is mostly for objects that get 
copied around a lot.  I don't particularly care about implementation 
hiding or compile times.  I care about memory usage and raw performance. 
  Pimpl gives me that for copy operations, at the cost of an extra level 
of redirection on other operations.

-- 
Rainer Deyke (rainerd_at_[hidden])