Re: [boost] [ Interest? ] [ out_ptr ] Tiny C++ Abstraction for C-Style Output Pointers

Subject: Re: [boost] [ Interest? ] [ out_ptr ] Tiny C++ Abstraction for C-Style Output Pointers
From: ThePhD (phdofthehouse_at_[hidden])
Date: 2018-07-03 13:04:07

Dear Gavin,

     In the proposal linked as part the P.S., that's actually one of the
names listed. It was also recommended by another person outside this list,
so I will keep that in mind going forward (the pair of names was
`c_out_ptr` and `c_inout_ptr`)!

     This library is not explicitly an annotation, but it also doubles as
that by its design: the free function makes it very noticeable that this
parameter is an output parameter.

Sincerely,
JeanHeyd

On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 12:15 AM, Gavin Lambert via Boost <
boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> On 3/07/2018 14:42, ThePhD wrote:
>
>>       This does not have any other use case than C and COM-Style API
>> interoperability: both `out_ptr` and `inout_ptr` and streamlined
>> interfaces
>> purely for this purpose and to make writing against such APIs more
>> pleasant, more performant, and (most of all) more developer-time
>> scale-able
>> than alternative approaches such as wrapping all such initialization-style
>> functions in C++-isms.
>>
>
> Purely for bikeshedding purposes a name like c_out_ptr might be better in
> that case.
>
> When initially seeing "out_ptr" and the syntax in your original email, at
> first glance it looked like the intent was as a reference wrapper
> annotation (to make it more obvious at the call site that the pointer will
> be modified on return), rather than the typical "solution" of using an
> /*out*/ comment or similar non-functional and non-checked annotation.
>
> (I suppose you can use std::ref for that purpose, but the intent is less
> clear.  And perhaps less necessary once compilers and libraries start using
> multiple return values via structured binding.)
>
>
>
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