Re: [boost] [variant2] Andrzej's review -- design

Subject: Re: [boost] [variant2] Andrzej's review -- design
From: Gavin Lambert (boost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2019-04-08 00:09:08

On 5/04/2019 22:06, Andrzej Krzemienski wrote:
> I do not mind never-empty guarantee in principle. My problem is that
> providing it involves too much overhead. The costs outweigh the benefit. If
> there was a way to provide the never-empty guarantee for free, I would be a
> strong proponent of it.

I agree with that; as I said elsewhere I would be (relatively) happy to 
pay that overhead for a strong-guarantee variant.  I don't see 
sufficient value in "never-empty" by itself to justify it.

But, maybe others have different lines in the sand.

> This is the type of code that I consider "requiring special attention". If
> the function throws it leaves x in a valid but unspecified state. I do not
> care much about "valid", but my concern is about "unspecified". I would
> never want anyone to observe the state of this object. Therefore I would
> rather change the signature of function f() like this:
> 
> template <class T>
> std::vector<T> f(std::vector<T> const & y )
> {
>    return std::vector<T>{y};
> }
> 
> So that it is guaranteed that upon exception no-one can see the value. Or
> if such rewrite is impossible, I would make sure that the object referred
> to by reference `x` is destroyed before any catch-handler tries to stop the
> stack unwinding.

Good in principle, but this just moves the problem to the caller. 
Either the caller initialises a new variable to call f(), in which case 
things are fine -- the return value is never visible.  Or the caller 
assigns an existing variable to call f(), in which case you're back to 
(almost) the original code.  (Granted it will be a copy-construction 
plus move-assignment instead of a single copy-assignment, but that may 
not be better.)

Despite some people talking recently about assignment being evil, it's a 
very important part of the language.  Otherwise we'd all be using 
functional languages.